The Divide
by Atiaran
Summary: Arcade and the Courier on the Lonesome Road. Female Courier, named Samara; spoilers
1. Chapter 1

**Standard disclaimer: **None of the characters, places, etc. in this story are mine, but are instead the property of Bethesda Game Studios. No copyright infringement is intended by their use in this story.

**Author's note:** Okay, I'm trying something a little different with this story. Normally, even when I write multi-chapter fics, I never upload anything until it is all finished. In this case, the entire story is finished, but my beta hasn't gotten all the way through it yet. I really want to get this up, so instead I'll be posting each chapter as my beta reviews it.

This story is firmly intended as a character piece exploring Arcade, Samara (my Courier) and the dynamic between them instead of something more along the lines of a walkthrough or "let's play." Because of this some liberties have been taken with the Lonesome Road DLC. It also will include a couple of chunks of headcanon for Arcade at some point. If that's a problem, don't say I didn't warn you. There will be two more short New Vegas stories after this, then a _really_ long New Vegas / Fallout 3 crossover coming at some point in the future (assuming I ever get it finished), and then _maybe_ another short New Vegas fic, but again, that's a long way off yet.

* * *

"_The other night I dreamt of knives  
Continental drift divide  
Mountains sit in a line….  
It's the end of the world as we know it  
And I feel fine."_

-"The End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," R.E.M.

"_This is the end  
Beautiful friend  
This is the end  
My only friend, the end  
Of our elaborate plans, the end  
Of everything that stands, the end...  
I'll never look into your eyes  
Again..."_

-"The End," Doors

* * *

_What makes a hero?_

Arcade chewed over the question as he and Samara stood on the lip of the Great Divide, looking out over the edge of the cliff, over the vast expanse of ruined and shattered land below. Far off in the distance, red lights blinked against the Divide's opposite wall, whose brown bulk reared up against the murky sky. Dust skirled endlessly through the crevices and canyons beneath them; lashed, stinging against Arcade's face, carried by the wind that whined in his ears. Strands of Samara's short brown hair stirred in the breeze; she had taken her helmet off and it hung at her hip. She raised one hand to shield herself from the blowing dust; her pale eyes squinted a bit, but otherwise she was as still as a statue, unblinking. Arcade's eyes flicked from the vista in front of them to Samara, studying her. The question he had asked Dala in Big Mountain, seemingly a lifetime ago, was foremost in his mind.

_What makes a hero?_

The cold distance in Samara's ice-blue eyes was unsettling; Arcade shifted a bit. "What are you thinking?" he asked her.

"That Ulysses is out there. Waiting for me. I can feel him." She didn't spare Arcade so much as a glance. _"I'm coming for you!"_ she shouted, so suddenly that Arcade flinched. The words rang out, echoing across the wasteland below. She stood there a moment longer, looking out over the edge as the wind howled, then glanced at Arcade.

"Come on." She jerked her head in the direction of the narrow trail along the cliff face. "Let's go."

[*]

The path led along the side of the cliff, too narrow for both of them to walk side-by-side; Arcade let Samara go first, bringing up the rear, his Plasma Defender drawn. The path ended in a metal door, set flush with the side of the mountain. It was tightly closed. A green sign was bolted to the right of the door, proclaiming:

HOPEVILLE BALLISTIC DEFENSE STATION  
Authorized Military Personnel Only

To the left was a fallen billboard, which had probably tumbled from the cliff above. _Building the American Dream … On Solid Ground!_ it announced, in bold, cheery letters. The words were flanked by two missiles and set on a brown background; across the top of the sign was a blue band with cartoon images of trees, a house and a building that might have been a school. It took him a moment to figure out that it was a stylized depiction of the missile base itself, with rockets sunken into the earth, underlying the surrounding residential community. The once-bright colors were faded to a pastel wash, and the billboard itself was tattered and torn. Arcade looked away.

"What's that, do you think?" he asked, pointing to a symbol that had been painted in white over the green sign: a central star surrounded by a circle of thirteen other stars, with five white stripes depending from it. Arcade recognized it as a crude representation of the flag of the prewar United States. There seemed something almost purposeful about its placement.

"It's Ulysses's symbol," Samara answered instantly. Her pale eyes were cold. "He left it for me-to show me the way. He wants me to follow him."

"Oh." Arcade shifted from foot to foot. "How do you know? It could be-"

"I know." Without another word, she stepped forward and fiddled with the door controls for a moment; the door folded its sections away with a grinding, rusty _squeeeal._ A drift of air wafted out from the dark passageway that revealed itself within, as stale and dank as air from a tomb, redolent with dust and decay. "Come on."

Arcade drew a breath. The dark mouth of the passage gaped, hungry and inviting; something about it gave him the chills. Suddenly he realized he did not particularly want to follow Samara into that darkness; a superstitious dread gripped him that if they descended that way into the dim interior of the base, one or both of them would not return. "_Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate,_" he muttered under his breath.

"_What?"_

_Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. _Arcade sighed. _Too late to back out now,_ he reminded himself. "Nothing. Lead the way."

Samara stepped over the threshold and shadows closed around her. After a moment's hesitation, Arcade followed.

[*]

_Should you journey to the Great Divide, you will find…. Death. Fire. Loss. The end of everything that has gone forward._

The prophecy he had received from the Think Tanks in Big Mountain dogged his heels as he entered the base, following Samara's uncompromising back. It was nonsense, Arcade firmly reminded himself as they descended; vague, meaningless nonse, most likely produced by some sort of random word generator. Yet somehow he could not put it from his mind.

They halted for a moment as the door closed behind them, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the dimness of the interior. When Arcade's eyes cleared, he found he was standing in a low, sloping passage with brownish-stained concrete walls. A bundle of cables ran along the ceiling, broken and sparking at the midpoint of the tunnel; the sparks provided just enough light to see a metal door at the far end. The sparks leapt and flickered off something shiny that was spread on the wall; Arcade squinted but could not see it clearly.

"Can you make that out?" he asked Samara, who was peering through the gloom.

Samara frowned, striding forward. She activated her Pip-Boy light. "Dunno. I think it's-"

Then she stopped, going absolutely still.

"What is it?" Arcade asked.

Samara made no response; she just stood there staring at the wall. She didn't even seem to have heard him.

"Samara?" He hurried to her side. "Samara, are you all ri-" Then his voice died in his throat as he caught sight of what she was staring at.

Splashed against the wall in foot-high letters, glistening a shocking, vehement red in the erratic light from the sparking wires, were the words:

You cAN Go HoME  
COURIER

_Paint,_ Arcade told himself. _It's paint. Blood would have dried to brown by now._ But the violence-the _viciousness_-behind the sneering message belied his rationalization. It chilled his bowels and turned his blood to ice with fear. Not for himself…but for Samara.

_He knew she was coming._

Arcade swallowed, hearing a dry, clicking sound in his throat. He glanced over at his companion. Samara hadn't moved; her pale eyes were frozen. As he saw her standing there in her hulking Powered Armor, Arcade was swept with an overwhelming sense of her _vulnerability_. She seemed somehow tremendously small and frail compared to the forces arrayed against her. He reached out only half-consciously to touch her shoulder- then drew back when it came to him what he was doing. _She wouldn't even be able to feel it through all that metal anyway_. Instead, he racked his brain, trying to think of something witty to say, but nothing came to mind. As he had at Big Mountain, he felt an almost irresistible impulse to just snatch her up in his arms and whisk her away from whatever this threat was that was aimed at her, that called her by name.

_Not that that would do any good._ He swallowed again. "Samara, are you okay?"

Samara's throat worked. She opened and closed her fingers on the stock of her weapon, and those icy eyes hardened. "Yeah." The word was rough, forced. "Let's go."

Almost violently, she wrenched herself away from the message and continued down the passage, toward the metal door at the far end. Arcade followed, his stomach churning.

More graffiti awaited them at the far end of the tunnel, by the interlocking metal door; two words were scrawled in that same, vicious bright red:

LoNESoME ROAD

A muscle in Samara's jaw jumped when she saw it. "Son of a bitch," she muttered in a savage undertone, and turned her attention to the door.

Arcade wet his lips; his mouth felt dry as a desert. "Our friend believes himself quite the artist, it seems."

It wasn't the best thing he'd ever come up with-hell, it wasn't even funny, really-but it was apparently enough; Samara burst into startled, relieved laughter and threw him a look of gratitude. Arcade managed an uneven smile in return, and somehow it was almost all right. The frozen distance around Samara thawed a bit as she bent to the opening mechanism, and the door split apart with a screech.

[*]

Beyond was a large, open, empty room with two more doors, one on either side. Across from the entrance stood a large computer console, in front of the room's dominant feature: a curved floor-to-ceiling window of scratched, dirty glass or plastic. Objects were visible beyond the window, but Arcade's eyes couldn't at first resolve the shapes. "Samara-?"

Samara was checking her PIP-Boy 3000. "Looks like we need to go _that_ way." She moved to the left-hand door, marked REACTOR, and fiddled with it for a moment. "Damn. It's sealed somehow. Arcade, check that console-see if there's a switch."

Arcade moved to the bank of computer equipment, examining it. "Doesn't look like it, at least, not that I can see. Maybe if you-" Then he raised his eyes to the window again. He fell silent.

"What is it?"

"Samara," he said quietly, "look. Look where we are."

Samara moved away from the door and came to stand next to him. When she caught sight of what was beyond the window, he heard her give a low, long whistle.

"_Wow."_

The curved window opened upon a huge, round, vertical open shaft. Arcade was terrible at gauging distances, but he would have guessed it was at least thirty feet across, possibly more than that. It was so tall that even by craning his neck he could not make out the top of it. The sides of the shaft were ringed with metal stairs and landing platforms; squinting upwards as far as he could see, he could make out other windows in the walls to the left, right and above.

The center of the shaft was dominated by a massive column of metal, at least ten feet in diameter, stretching up out of sight and mounted on two flaring cones. The cones were black, but the column itself was a rusty white and gray, as were the smaller cylinders subsidiary to it. Arcade saw the red, white and blue flag stenciled on the side, under the capitalized, vertical words UNITED STATES, and a chill surrounded him. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stiffen in mingled awe and fear. Save for a few inches of glass, he was standing before one of the giants that had shaken the Old World to its knees.

"We're actually _in_ the goddamned _missile silo,_" he breathed.

The two of them stood there for a long moment, side by side, gazing up at the monster that had shaped their world. Gooseflesh prickled on Arcade's arms where the armor left them bare, and he rubbed himself briskly. He stole a glance at Samara; her face was unreadable, but there was a curious immobility about her that hinted at the presence of some deep emotion.

Samara broke the moment first. "Come on. We need to find a way through here." She turned away, and Arcade, after a last, lingering look, followed her.

[*]

The door on the right-hand side of the room was marked UTILITY. It too was locked, but after a moment or two of fiddling with the computer terminal on the wall nearby, Samara was able to open this one; Arcade, whose skills were strictly medical and who, despite his background, had never really "gotten" machines, stood and watched uselessly. Beyond the door was another curving passage, with pipes running along the walls, its end out of sight.

"Are you sure this is the right way?" Arcade asked her as they followed the corridor.

"It's not," Samara said briefly, indicating her PIP-Boy 3000. "We need to go to the reactor. But maybe going this way we can find something to help us open the other door."

At the end of the passage was a large room with another bank of windows on the left-hand side, so scratched and cloudy with dirt and age that they were almost completely opaque. Arcade was glad; the vast, brooding presence of that missile just beyond the glass in the other room had given him the creeps. There was nothing here except for a couple desks and banks of computer equipment on the left side under the window, and a long, low catwalk on the right, ending in something that he recognized as a Bot Maintenance Pod.

"Think any of those computers still work?" Arcade asked.

"Check them and find out." Samara was intently studying her PIP-Boy; then she looked from there up to the cylindrical maintenance tubes. "These Bot Pods might have something…." She trailed off. She mounted the catwalk, her armored tread ringing on the metal, and approached the pod at the end.

"See something?" The glass of the pod was too clouded for Arcade to make out anything from where he stood.

"I'm not sure. It looks like…." She turned to address the pod maintenance terminal. After a few moments of tapping, there was a hissing sound. The pod door slid open to reveal—

Arcade frowned. _What the hell?_

"_ED-E!"_

Arcade looked sharply over at Samara's delighted cry. From the maintenance pod there floated a round eyebot, bristling with antennae, the exact twin of ED-E back in the Mojave Wastes. The eyebot hovered forward a few paces, then turned and faced Samara. It chirped inquiringly.

"ED-E, am I glad to see you!" Samara looked thrilled. Her entire face lit up at the sight of the little eyebot; she was actually smiling, not one of the small, fleeting smiles Arcade had seen from her in the past but a bright grin of sheer pleasure. Arcade had never seen her look so happy since he had known her. His brows drew together; he felt slightly miffed, though he couldn't say why. He approached the two of them, climbing up the steps to the catwalk.

"Samara, that's not ED-E," he corrected her, somewhat irked. "That's just another eyebot. We—the En—they made thousands of those things. What one of them's doing here, I don't know, but in any case, it's not ED-E."

Samara and the eyebot both swiveled to face him; Samara glared at him and the eyebot chirped and spat a harsh crackle of static. "No. It's ED-E. Isn't that right?" she asked the bot, which gave a happy beep. She turned that bright smile back on the little eyebot. "See?"

"Well, that response certainly proves it, all right." Arcade folded his arms across his chest. "I hate to break it to you, Samara, but those bots are programmed to respond to any question by beeping like that. It doesn't actually mean anything."

Samara glared at him again. "ED-E, if you really are ED-E, beep twice. Okay?" The eyebot obligingly gave two chirps. "What did I tell you?"

"Yes, because you just gave it the answer you wanted to hear. That bot probably didn't understand anything beyond 'beep twice.' Have you ever heard of Clever Hans?"

She faced him now. "What's your problem, Arcade?"

"My problem is, we don't need an eyebot with us," he said, his voice rising in irritation. "They're hard to control, have notoriously buggy target-identification systems, and have a nasty tendency to overload at the worst times. The things I—" He caught himself and broke off, not wanting Samara to wonder how he knew all this. Lamely, he finished, "We'd be better off leaving it here."

"ED-E isn't like that," Samara said. Those pale eyes glimmered. "ED-E's my friend, and he's never been anything but useful for as long as I've had him."

"But that _isn't ED-E._" Arcade sighed heavily. "Why should we take it with us? What can it do for us?"

She turned back to look at the floating eyebot. Her face softened, filling with a warmth he had never seen her show toward any human being. _Veronica would probably have died happy if Samara ever looked at her like that. _ "He can hack the door," she replied.

"Hack the—Samara, that's a _weapons support platform._"

"ED-E can do it," was her only response. "I know he can. Come on."

[*]

Samara turned out to be right, not that Arcade was pleased to admit it; after a few moments of working silently at the computer console in the main room, ED-E gave a happy beeping and the door unlocked. Samara glanced over at Arcade. "You see?"

"I concede the point," he replied, less than graciously.

They walked down another passageway, past what turned out to be an empty utility closet, and stepped through a door on their left, out onto a metal landing jutting into the cavernous space of the missile silo itself.

For a long moment, the two of them simply stood there side by side for a long moment, staring up at the massive weapon.

"Wow." Arcade's voice echoed in that vast emptiness; the echoes bounced his words back to him, sounding strangely, unintentionally reverential_._ "So there it is, in the flesh. Or, I guess, metal."

Samara said nothing. Her ice-blue eyes were shadowed as she gazed up—and up—and _up_—at the huge missile before them. It loomed over the two of them, resting quiescent in its enormous, circular cathedral. As his eyes traced the height of the thing, Arcade suddenly understood the tall tales he'd occasionally heard from drifters who had come from the East: bizarre tales of something called the Church of the Atom, a strange religious sect that worshipped an atomic bomb. The tower before them was awe-inspiring. Just being in the huge metal thing's presence sent chills down Arcade's spine. _Cold metal now,_ he thought, _but with heat enough to set the world on fire…._

"That's it, then." He hadn't realized he was speaking aloud until Samara looked over at him in confusion. "That's it. The pinnacle, the—the _magnum opus_ of everything the Old World ever produced. Right there. Their greatest work, the absolute best they could do was that—that instrument of mass destruction."

Samara's brows drew together. "Arcade, are you all right?"

Arcade pulled off his glasses and rubbed at his closed eyes. A dull, frustrated anger was burning inside him. _All their resources, their knowledge, their learning, their skills—compared to those Old World giants, we're nothing more than children. And this—__**this**__ is what they chose to do with it all._ He thought of the Think Tanks in Big Mountain, those arrogant, murderous, solipsistic geniuses, living embodiments of everything that had been wrong with the Old World, and his anger sharpened. _Oh, they could do wonders, all right, and this technological terror was the greatest of them all. All that potential, used for nothing more than creating death. _The thought occurred to him that he was being unfair, but Arcade harshly dismissed it. _And we're still doing it, right now, back in the Mojave—drawing on the refuse of a dead world, and turning those fragments into weapons. War. War never changes. Haven't we learned a goddamned thing?_

Apparently not, Arcade mused. It struck him—and left him vaguely uneasy—that the Followers of the Apocalypse were playing essentially the same game as the Legion and the NCR: sifting through the wreckage of the Old World for any scraps they could use in the present. Of course it wasn't the same at all, he hastily corrected himself; the Followers were trying to _help_ people, while the Legion and the NCR were searching for weapons—but the thought was still more than a little uncomfortable.

Samara was still staring at him; Arcade realized he hadn't answered her question. "No, I'm not all right," he said shortly, "but that doesn't matter. Let's go on. This thing—" he nodded toward the missile "—is giving me the creeps."

They went up a set of spiral stairs, with ED-E bobbing along behind them, to come upon another metal landing. After some fiddling with a wall-mounted computer, Samara was able to open a door marked OPERATIONS. The room inside, roughly L-shaped, was filled with overturned tables and banks of computer equipment surrounding what looked like a central workstation. Pinned to one wall was a bulletin board with schematics for some kind of weapon. As mechanically illiterate as Arcade was, he could tell that it was a rocket launcher.

"Red Glare?" he murmured to himself, studying the plans.

Samara glanced over her shoulder. "Come_ on, _Arcade. We need to move." The eyebot chirped agreement.

"Fine, whatever," he said, sighing, and followed her through the exit.

The next set of stairs rose to a small corner landing, then turned at a right angle and continued to rise. Samara's heavy tread and the whining of her armor echoed loudly in the small passageway, as did the humming of the new eyebot's thrusters (_it's __**not**__ED-E,_ Arcade thought somewhat pettishly). They continued to climb until they reached another closed door; the sign over this one said STORAGE.

"Who laid this silo out?" Arcade demanded. "This makes no sense. Why is the storage area connected directly to Main Operations? Shouldn't there be a main office up here somewhere? A break room? Living quarters? I'm beginning to think those ancients didn't know as much as we thought."

Samara paid him no attention, stepping forward and touching the control panel. The door folded itself away again. Looking over Samara's shoulder, Arcade saw another twisted jumble of ruined shelves. "I hope they had more storage space than this for the entire silo, because if—"

Then he looked past her and his voice died in his throat.

Pinned to the wall across from them was a limp human figure. This by itself neither distressed nor particularly surprised Arcade; like all who lived in the wastes, he had done enough and seen enough to become fairly inured to the sight of death. However, even from across the room, with the figure in profile and heavily backlit by the room's single still-functioning bank of fluorescent lights, he could see enough to tell—

"There's something wrong with it," Samara said, uttering his thoughts.

"Yeah, there is." He shouldered past her and crossed the room to examine the figure, hearing Samara's lumbering tread as she followed him. Together they regarded the unfortunate soul pinned to the wall.

The strange apparition appeared to be the body of a male; heavily built and muscular, wearing damaged, battered brown combat armor. Gender was hard to tell, though, partly because the armor obscured the shape of the body within but also because there was no skin left on the creature anywhere. Arms, legs, face—all had been completely denuded. The red cords of muscle were obscenely vivid in the harsh lighting.

The two of them stood side by side, studying the poor creature. "What happened to him?" Samara asked at last. Her eyes narrowed. "Was he tortured? Is that why—" She gestured wordlessly to the thing before them.

Arcade frowned. "No smell—this was recent. And no—I don't think this was done to torture him. Where's the blood? Look—the floor is clean. Even if they did this to him somewhere else and then dragged him here, he would have been bleeding all over the place and it would have gotten everywhere." He laid his fingertips against the exposed muscle of the creature's arm. It was dry and hard to the touch—_like ghoul flesh,_ his mind supplied. "Some kind of ghoul, maybe?"

Samara shrugged. "Maybe. He's wearing armor…."

"Yes, and the armor's been patched, but badly," Arcade murmured. The brown shell of the armor was pitted and dented, and it had been bizarrely patched with a litter of random street signs, pieces of sheet metal, and old license plates. "That would suggest sentience, of a sort. But it also suggests that either he's not smart enough to know how to really fix his armor, or else that he doesn't have the equipment to do so. Incidentally, the fact that he's still wearing armor suggests against torture as well—if this was done deliberately, why would his torturers allow him to keep his armor?" He was silent a moment, trying to make sense of the spectacle before him. "These patches—I can't help but think they're mostly for looks."

"I think you're right," Samara agreed. "I mean, look at this—" She pointed to a chunk of a stop-sign. "Thin metal. This wouldn't stop a bullet, wouldn't even slow one down. The armor…." She looked at him with solemn eyes. "It almost looks like NCR Trooper Armor."

Arcade suddenly realized she was right. "Do you suppose we've found one of the NCR's missing soldiers?"

"Don't know. Maybe." Samara seemed troubled. She was silent for a moment, gazing at the human figure. At last, she brought out: "Somehow this feels like it was meant for me."

A cold shiver passed down Arcade's spine. "Don't be ridiculous," he scolded Samara. "That's nonsense."

Except it didn't _feel_ like nonsense, especially not when coupled with the graffiti they'd seen earlier. The display of this body—the first evidence of any living thing they'd seen so far—felt like a personal threat, aimed directly at her. Arcade shifted from foot to foot, his skin crawling with a vague, nebulous sense of danger; again that sensation of Samara as small, frail, and horribly vulnerable came over him. She said nothing further, just stared at the figure, biting her lip. At last, he asked her in a low voice, "What do you want to do?"

She shook her head slowly. "Only one thing _to_ do. Keep on moving; find out what happens." Samara glanced at him, another one of those sideways glances. "Arcade….."

"Yes?"

She started to say something, then stopped. She reached out instead, hesitated, then gripped him by the shoulder, giving him a rough, awkward squeeze. "Let's go," was all she said. She started for the room's exit, and he followed her. The eyebot bobbed after them.

[*]

The exit took them back out to the shadowed, cavernous missile bay, onto another semi-circular metal landing. This one had two doors, one on the left-hand wall marked MAIN ENTRANCE and the other in the wall all the way across from them, marked SECURITY.

"That's where we want to go," Samara said, nodding to MAIN ENTRANCE. When she touched the door control panel, it folded itself away to reveal a square room divided longitudinally into two separate bays. The bay down which they were staring had a desk with an overturned chair in the middle and led to a separate door, also marked MAIN ENTRANCE. Samara fiddled with that one for a moment, then shook her head.

"Locked again," she pronounced. "ED-E?"

The eyebot drifted over to examine the door, then floated into the other bay, to the right. This bay was lined with banks and banks of computer equipment. The bot focused on a terminal station, then chirped.

"Can't get through," Samara diagnosed. "He says he needs some specialized codes."

Arcade exhaled slowly. "Great. And where are we supposed to find those?"

"Dunno." Samara shrugged. "Let's try Security."

They filed back through the landing to the door to the security office. Samara messed with this one for a bit, and then it slid open too.

When this door folded itself aside, they were looking into a large, roughly square room. Almost directly across from them, in an alcove, was a round wooden desk backed by a bank of computer equipment and holding a small terminal. A dimly seen form sprawled in the chair at the desk; by the angle of the shoulders, the tilt to the head, it was clear the figure at the desk was dead.

"Who do you think that is?" Samara asked, her voice hushed. "Another—like the one downstairs?"

Arcade shook his head. "Doesn't look like it from here."

They entered the room. Samara stopped, looking down. "There's something on the floor."

A large, tiled square bearing a circular design of some sort was inset onto the floor before the desk. It was covered with dust and refuse. The two of them scraped at it with their boots, clearing some of the trash off the design. Arcade frowned.

"It looks like a seal of some kind."

"Yeah." Samara scraped at some more dust, revealing a circle bearing the design of a large shield, on which was superimposed a sword and buckler, blue with thirteen stars, wreathed with olive branches. "Look, there are words—" She traced the outer rim of the circle. "_Ballistic Defense Division, Commonwealth Defense Administration,_" she read. "And there's a banner under it—" She squinted at the tiled gold ribbon under the shield. "It's not English-it looks like that Latin stuff you and the Legion use all the time. _Exitus….acta…._" she read haltingly, _"acta … " _She cleared some more trash out of the way. "I can't make out the last word—"

"_Probat,"_ Arcade supplied dryly. _"Exitus acta probat._"

"Oh." She looked over at him. "What's it mean?"

The corner of his mouth twitched. "'The end justifies the means.'"

"Really?"

"Close enough." He sighed, rubbing at his eyes again. "Come on. The faster we find these codes, the faster we can get out of here."

Upon investigation, the computer terminal on the desk across the room appeared to be still working, though its dim green screen flickered and was choppy with static. While Samara worked on hacking the terminal, Arcade turned his attention to the figure sprawled in the chair, stiff and cold.

_It's a ghoul,_ he realized. He bent closer. The man wore a uniform of a type Arcade had seen in prewar holotapes: a U.S army uniform. Arcade knew enough to tell that the four stars on the man's epaulets indicated that he had been a general, a speculation further confirmed by the name badge: _Gen. Martin Retslaf._

"Move him out of the way," Samara ordered peremptorily. "I need more room; I can't even see what I'm doing." Her bulky Powered Armor was an awkward fit in the tight wooden horseshoe of the desk. Arcade shoved at the man's chair, and it rolled backward; as it did, General Retslaf's position shifted, and his head slumped. The entire back of his skull was gone, Arcade realized: a ruin of shattered bone fragments and dried blood and pieces of brain that coated the back of the chair. More spots of blood stippled the computer bank behind him. Arcade glanced to the side and saw that there was a 10mm pistol lying on the surface of the desk, right where it would have fallen out of the man's hand. He wrapped his arms around himself, resting his eyes on the man while Samara worked away, heedless, at the computer terminal behind him; the clicking of keys filled the tomblike silence in the bunker as she typed.

_How did it end for you, I wonder?_ Arcade mused. The man was a ghoul, which suggested that he'd lived for some time after the bombs had dropped; and he was a general, which meant that he was almost certainly the base's commander and the one who would have been responsible for the orders to launch when the balloon went up, so long ago. Arcade's imagination painted a bleak picture for him: General Retslaf, the base's commander and sole survivor, wandering the still, corpse-filled corridors of the dead missile silo, his mind and body slowly disintegrating under the burden of guilt and radiation. _Until finally, with the last vestige of sanity remaining to him, acting on the remaining traces of memory of what he was and what he did, he dons his uniform, takes his service pistol, retreats to the desk from which he gave the final order, and shoots himself in the head._ _Was that how it was?_ No way to tell, of course, Arcade knew…but somehow, this felt right. The thought filled him with a profound, almost overwhelming sense of horror and pity.

"There, got it," Samara announced, straightening. "ED-E?" The little eye-bot chirped an affirmation. "Okay, that's it. Arcade," she said, glaring at him. "Quit fooling around with that dead guy. We need to move."

Arcade's jaw tightened. "Should we…do anything for him?"

"Why?" she asked, staring at him blankly. "We didn't for the other dead guy back there."

"I just…ah, never mind," he said, sighing. "Forget it."

"Right." She put out her hand and scooped up the 10-mm, tucking it away inside her armor, then jerked her head toward the door. "Come on."

[*].

Back in the horseshoe-shaped room, the eyebot flitted immediately over to the computer mainframe and communed with it for a moment, then gave a happy chirp. Samara nodded. "That's it."

She approached the door to the outside, Arcade following behind her. He waited as she touched the controls to open the door; the door folded back and an alarm indicator started to blare—

"_Holy shit!"_

The words burst from his lips. Everything seemed to skid to a halt. An icy wave crashed over Arcade; his chest locked up and his heart lurched. On the other side of the door, almost right in the doorframe, were three massive sentry bots. The huge, glistening gray metallic monsters were each as tall as a man; resting on wheeled tripod-legs, their two gun arms—one a laser cannon, the other a modified missile launcher—were aimed right at himself and Samara. Their small, dome-shaped heads swiveled, and their optic sensors flared as one, two, three, they all locked onto their targets. Arcade was frozen, his heart ice; he couldn't move, could do nothing but stare at the three hulking forms. His mind plunged out of control, recalling the sentry bots' armaments, calculating coldly and precisely the effect such weapons would have on the human body when fired at point-blank range. Lovingly rendered, extremely graphic images in all their gruesome, medically accurate detail flashed before his mind's eye—

-when Samara's gauntleted hand planted itself right in the middle of his chest. He got a flash of her pale eyes, blazing almost white, before a tremendous _shove_ sent him staggering backwards with such force that he almost tripped over the desk in the middle of the room. Samara snatched her helmet from her hip and jammed it on her head, calling out, _"ED-E! Back!"_ The little eyebot chirped as Samara lunged for the door—

Lunged _through_ the door—

And the sound of rumbling metal filled the air as the door slid shut behind her. Arcade caught himself on the desk and straightened, staring blankly after her.

The door was closed. Samara was on the other side.

With a cry of desperation, he flung himself at it, groping at the entry mechanism, but it was frozen solid. _Locked, goddamnit, locked-_ He could hear muffled explosions, the rapid chatter of laser cannon fire, and then a heavier explosion—_a missile? Dear God—_ Nightmare images filled his mind. He pounded frantically on the steel door, hard enough to cut his knuckles. Drops of red stained the dull metal. He backed up and kicked at it wildly; the door rang under his blows, but did not give way. He heard the zing of Samara's pulse gun, and her shouts of rage and terror, crackling and distorted with electronic feedback.

With a wrench, Arcade rounded on the eyebot. "Open the door!" he shouted at it. It beeped in confusion. "She's dying out there! Open—ED-E, _open the goddamned door!"_

ED-E whistled assent and spun back to the computer banks. Arcade snatched out his weapon and pressed himself against the wall beside the entrance. His Plasma Defender was shaking in his hands; he hurled epithets against himself, for letting Samara leave him like that, at Samara for rushing ahead and putting herself in that position, hell, even at the damned eye-bot for letting the door lock behind her. The metal strips of the door folded themselves away, showing the gray concrete tunnel beyond….

The first thing Arcade saw was a laser turret on a large concrete block dais, protected by a waist-high ring of sandbags. Tucked into the bend of the tunnel beyond the door, it had been concealed by the three sentry bots before; now, however, it was visible and firing at something—_someone_—just outside his visual field. Its seeking sensor moved, scanning, and it began to swivel toward him. Arcade raised his weapon and fired at it, and it burst in a brilliant shower of green sparks. He darted through the open door in a flash, heading for the now-destroyed turret; he had no idea what, if anything, was aiming at it that he couldn't see, but he knew he couldn't stay where he was. His heart was pounding in his chest, and adrenaline sparkled along his veins like whiskey. He vaulted the ring of sandbags in one bound, and flung himself down between the wall and the concrete dais. Panting great gasps of air, he raised himself on one knee and lifted his weapon, scanning in haste for Samara. A laser cannon chattered to his right, and a blast of laser fire almost took his head off; he flung himself down again, breathing hard, inhaling the reek of damp concrete and old rot. _Shit! Shit! Shit!—_

There was a chirping sound as the eyebot sailed over his head, and a shattering detonation echoed from the same direction the laser fire had come from. Gambling that the little bot had taken out whatever menace lurked over that way, Arcade forced himself to look out over the sandbag parapet again. A shock of ice water jolted in his veins as he realized he was staring directly at another turret across the tunnel, aimed right at him; then he registered the scorch marks and realized that it too was inactive. The middle of the tunnel was dominated by two of the sentry bots, tipped over, their wheels spinning; and pressed against the wall, right where the corridor opened out into two bays, was the bulky form of—

"_Samara!_"

_On her feet, thank God, she's standing at least-_ Her helmeted head turned toward him. She held up one finger and jerked her head left. He had no time to interpret what she was trying to tell him before she lunged away from the wall.

A shower of red light lanced out. Samara was moving on a diagonal; she pivoted and fired three shots of her pulse gun to no discernable effect. Arcade could hear the deep electronic chatter and mechanical grinding of the third sentry bot, out of sight around the wall of the tunnel. Samara bounded backward two more steps, raised her weapon to fire again, when another bolt of sizzling red energy struck her armored form full in the chest. She dropped like a discarded marionette.

"_No!_" Arcade heard himself cry. Wild panic leaped up in him, burning his brain and filling him with a terrible, agonized fury. The groaning and whining of the third sentry bot grew louder; and a moment later, it rolled into view. With all that frightened rage, Arcade lined up his shot and squeezed the trigger of the Plasma Defender again and again, sending bolt after bolt of green light smashing into the sentry bot. The bot shuddered, ground to a halt; then a miniature detonation blew off its front panel. It tipped over and fell onto its side, only narrowly missing Samara's prostrate form.

Except for the muted, distant blaring of the alarm, which had continued throughout the battle, all was quiet in the tunnel.

_Samara…._

Arcade scrambled out from behind the sandbag ring and across the tunnel to Samara's still form. His hands were still shaking with reaction; his armor seemed to weigh a ton as he fell heavily to his knees at her side. _Damn it, Samara, damn it, damn it-_ His thoughts were a mess; for a moment he couldn't think where to start. Over his head, he heard the little eyebot beeping, but it seemed like something in a different world.

_Okay. Calm down,_ he told himself. _Just like in emergency training: start by assessing her condition._

Assess her condition. Easier said than done. Hell, he couldn't even tell if she was bleeding or not; Powered Armor was a completely enclosed environment with the seals engaged. She could be bleeding to death in there and he wouldn't even know it. The armor seemed completely unfamiliar and his eyes could not make sense of it. _Damn it, __**focus!**_ _Think. What do you have to work with_?

He stared down at her. Enclave Powered Armor, he remembered, was designed with an accessible panel that gave a readout of its occupant's vital signs; it was intended to help army medics in combat make rapid diagnoses. Enclave Armor had been derived from the U.S. Army's original Powered Armor designs, which was essentially what the Brotherhood of Steel used. So Samara's Brotherhood Armor should have something like that. Enclave armor had the readout panel on the soldier's vambrace, so maybe—

He pawed at Samara's right arm, the one without her PIP-Boy gauntlet, searching for a catch or a button. A bright flare of elation passed through him as her vambrace opened up to reveal a glowing screen underneath, to be followed by wild despair: the screen contained nothing but flickering nonsense characters. _System overloaded from the blast, goddamnit-_ He fumbled with the screen for a moment more, searching for a hard reset catch to reboot the system, but nothing he saw looked familiar. _Goddamn Brotherhood, why the __**hell**__ can't their armor make sense like the Enclave's?_ With a frustrated cry, he let her arm fall back down to her side. He ripped off his helmet, flinging it aside, and ran his hands through his hair, trying to think.

_All right. What next. Onboard diagnostics are down, so you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way. Quickly. Move! _He actually flinched, hearing the words in the harsh, impatient voice of his first instructor.

He groped at the area where Samara's helmet joined to her cuirass; the seals were unfamiliar and it took him much longer than it should have to figure them out. At last he was able to break the seal and he pulled her helmet off, cursing the Brotherhood and their confusing armor to all the hells and back. Samara's head rolled limply to the side, strands of her short-cut, reddish-brown hair sticking to her cheek. Her face was deathly pale, almost white, and when Arcade lifted her eyelids to check, he saw that her eyes had rolled back in her head.

"Samara. _Samara!"_ he called her. No effect. He slapped her cheek lightly and nothing. _Damn it- _Taking her head in his hands, he gently tilted it back, lifting her chin to clear her airway, then leaned close, listening for her breathing. He did not like what he heard: her breath was rapid and shallow. He laid his fingers against her throat, checking her carotid artery, and liked that even less: her pulse was a light, quick fluttering against his fingertips. _She's going into shock-Shit-Shit-! _Then he gave himself a rough mental shake.

_Come on, Gannon, you __**know**__ this. When in doubt- _He reached down to the right lower compartment on his armor where he stored his stimpaks and seized one. He paused for a moment, choosing the best place, then jabbed it right into her body where her shoulder met her neck.

His attention was riveted to her face. _Come on, Samara, come on, come on—_

Slowly, her breathing began to improve; it strengthened, steadied, but only somewhat. When he checked her pulse again it was stronger…but not _enough._ Her face remained that deathly, waxen color, and her skin was still clammy under his fingertips. And she still did not waken. A terrible dread gripped Arcade—that he had failed her, that he had let her down—and with cold, desperate fingers, he took another stimpak and jammed it into her throat.

It felt like hours; he sat there, watching her, his fists clenched, _willing_ her to come back to him-watching as inch by inch, Samara fought her way back to life. Slowly, _achingly_ slowly, the color crept back into her complexion. Her breathing steadied, became deeper, stronger. Finally, her eyelids fluttered. She opened her eyes.

"Ar—Arcade?" Her voice was thick, slurred.

_Thank God._ "Do you remember where you are?"

Her armor whined and ground as she sat up, rubbing at her head. The bulkiness of the armor strangely seemed to accentuate the unsteadiness of her movements. "Yeah…in the Great Divide. We're goin after Ulysses. Arcade, what th' hell happened?"

"You took a laser blast directly to the chest. You're lucky to be _alive,_" he said waspishly. Suddenly, all the fright and stress of the past few moments crashed down on him and exploded into bright anger. "What the _hell _did you think you were _doing_, running off like that?"

Her brows contracted in confusion. "Running off like…you mean, with the sentry bots?"

"_Yes_, with the sentry bots! You could have been _killed!_ Jesus, haven't you—haven't you been through enough already?" The horrific images he had conjured of the damage the sentry bot could have done to her still lurked in the back of his mind-and behind _those_ were the memories of the canopic jars in Big Mountain, holding pieces of her body. They combined with the image of her pale, ashen face to fan his anger; he wanted to grab her by the shoulders and just _shake_ sense into her. "Damn it, you _know_ better than that! Why would you _do_ such a thing?!"

Samara shifted uneasily, drawing away from him a bit. She averted her eyes, looking almost sheepish. "I dunno. I'm sorry," she offered. "Sorry, Arcade. I didn't mean to make you upset…. I guess—when I saw the three sentry bots, I just….You were only in Combat Armor. I had Powered Armor, and….I thought that I—"

"_Powered Armor?_ God_damn it,_ Samara!" He couldn't remember ever being so furious. "Wearing Powered Armor _doesn't make you invincible!_ My instructors _drilled_ that into my head, what the _hell_ did _yours_ teach you? It'd be just like the damned arrogant Brotherhood to think they can take on Deathclaws barehanded because they have Powered Armor! Christ _above!_ If ED-E hadn't hacked the door, I—You could have—" He broke off, turning away, clenching his fists and struggling to control himself.

Samara's brows were furrowed. "I'm sorry, Arcade," she offered him once more. "I just didn't want you to get hurt. I won't do it again."

He nodded curtly, still too angry with her to speak. There was silence for a moment, and then he became aware that Samara was staring at him.

"What?"

"You have Powered Armor training."

_Shit._ His blood chilled. He couldn't even _deny_ it; he'd just told her that in so many words. _God damn it, Gannon, how could you let that slip?_

"Yes," he said ungraciously.

Her pale eyes narrowed. "Why did you never mention this before?"

"Would you accept 'You never asked?'"

_Doesn't look like it. _The stony hardness in her face did not abate. Arcade held his tongue, waiting. After a time, she asked, "Where'd you get it?"

"Oh, you know," he said with attempted lightness. "Just picked it up, here and there."

"No one 'just picks up' Powered Armor training." Those eyes narrowed further. "_Where'd you get it?"_

He exhaled slowly. "Samara, do you remember what I said before?"

"What would that be?"

"_Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies."_ Her gaze would have left scorch marks on steel; Arcade met it head on, refusing to back down. _You're not getting any more out of me,_ he told her silently.

At last, she looked away, considering. Arcade internally breathed a sigh of relief; he would have moved to wipe the sweat off his forehead except that he knew she would pick up on it. When she looked at him again, her pale eyes were ice.

"Arcade, _have_ you ever lied to me?"

"_Lied?_ No." He crossed his arms over his chest.

"Will you ever lie to me?"

That caught him off-guard; he hesitated a long time, trying to figure out how to honestly answer. At last he sighed. "I'll do my best to avoid it."

Samara stared at him again. Arcade was silent. He could have said more—made protestations of loyalty, perhaps, or pointed to the aid he'd just rendered her—but he sensed any such protestations would fall flat. _It's on the table; either she trusts me or she doesn't._ He waited with folded arms. At last, after a long period of scrutiny, she nodded.

"Well, I guess that'll have to be good enough then, won't it?" She stood up decisively, with an air of slamming the door on the subject. Arcade felt tension lift from his shoulders like weight. He gathered his helmet as Samara reset her armor, and the two of them continued up the passage in silence. Behind them, the eyebot followed.

[*]

"More graffiti," Samara muttered as she prodded the controls for the base's main exit. Her shoulders were tense under the heavy armor, and she avoided looking at the bright red letters. Arcade gritted his teeth.

"He's trying to rattle you."

"Really, you think?" Samara stepped back and let the door fold itself away with a rusty metal screeching. Arcade felt a rush of wind past his face as the stale atmosphere of the tunnel—an atmosphere that had been undisturbed for who knew how many decades—was displaced by the air from the outside.

The two of them stood for a moment, peering out through the metal archway into the world beyond. The sky filling the arch was the same gooey orange it had been up top: a thick, heavy overcast through which the sun shone only feebly. To either side of the doorway were thick walls of rock stretching up into an arch above them; the door had been set into the side of the mountain. In front of them, the ground sloped down a long and gentle grade to a chain-link fence, on the other side of which was a scattered collection of army barracks. Beyond the barracks, dimly glimpsed in the filtered light from the sullen sky, were the ruins of crumbling concrete structures that might once have been the outskirts of a town or city.

_Hopeville,_ Arcade thought. _They built the town right __**on top of**__ the damned missile base. Christ._

Samara had her head down and was gazing intently at her PIP-Boy; Arcade frowned. "Do you see anything?" he asked her.

She held up one hand for silence, studying her screen. "There's something moving down there," she said after a moment, "but I don't see—"

A screeching feedback whine from the eyebot cut her off. Arcade jumped, almost leaping out of his skin. Samara jolted as well, straightening from her PIP-Boy with a jerk, turning to face her metal satellite. The bot rotated toward them, whining still, and its speakers crackled to life.

"_So you came, Courier, following the trail I left for you, messages like pebbles dropped in the Waste, signposts carved on the barren land. You came…but not alone. Brought a shadow with you, dogging your steps, trailing at your heels like a cloak. Wonder—did you fear to face me, Courier, without your little follower at your side? Not the way this was to go. Not the way history would have it—it was to be Courier versus Courier, West versus East—if, that is, the Divide doesn't get you first. The Mojave didn't do it. The Chip didn't do it. Yet the Divide may end all."_

The voice was a deep baritone, rasping with something that might have been static feedback, where it issued from the eyebot's speakers; the static gave it a grinding, alien quality. Arcade had never heard anything like it before.

"_Ulysses."_

The word was spoken in a kind of rolling growl that originated from the back of Samara's throat. At the sound, the hairs on the nape of Arcade's neck stiffened, and a chill ran down the outside of his body. Samara's pale eyes were shining with an awful, terrifying light. He took a step back from her, almost without realizing it.

"_Not my birth name. One I chose for my own. Name of a man before the War, a man who had to make two flags into one, to forge a single nation out of a squabbling and divided people. He did it, and it killed him. There was no place for him in the world he made-the world of peace. Lesson there, for those who wish to learn it. Those like you, and I. Courier."_ The word was shadowed with contempt. The voice from the eyebot rebounded from the mountain cliffs above, sending echoes bouncing out and back to them from across the barren landscape below. Arcade glanced at Samara, then stepped forward. He wet his lips.

"All right," he called to the eyebot. "You brought us here. What do you want?"

"I don't _care_ what you want!" Samara shouted. She whipped a furious glare at Arcade, her eyes burning so hotly he recoiled, before turning back to the little eyebot. "Come on out, and we'll settle this now!"

"_Searched for you down the roads and years-followed a shadow, a trail, footsteps in the dust. Found only empty air…a name, a rumor, a ghost. Tired of chasing you. Your turn. You come to me, Courier. Through the Divide. Walk it. See it. You _must_ see it. It is your history."_

Arcade heard Samara draw in her breath in shock. She had gone completely still, her hands clenched at her sides. Her face had frozen; only those ice-blue eyes blazed.

"What do you mean, my _history?"_

"_History. Home. All men and women have one, and this was yours. Not the place you were born, perhaps; but the place you returned to, the place you built. Step upon step, brick upon brick, rising like hope out of the ash of the Divide. The NCR, that dying husk into which you've been attempting to breathe new life-it was never yours. _This_ place was yours, this broken land where you rooted, where you grew…until the day you brought it all down."_

"What the _hell_ are you _talking about!?_' The words were almost a scream.

"_Talking about the past, Courier. Yours and mine. Ties that bind us, shape us. You may have it, if you want, but not free for the asking. Nothing is free in this world, and why should this be different? No, if history matters to you-you'll need to earn it."_

"_Earn_ it? _**Earn**__ it?_ How about if I _beat it out of you, _you _son of a bitch!_" Samara's entire body was taut with fury, and the servos in her armor whined. "_Come on out and face me, or are you afraid!?_"

And Ulysses began to laugh. It was a terrible, grating sound, his harsh voice rasping through the eyebot's speakers, a rough, mocking chuckle that went on and on. Samara gave an inarticulate cry, something between a sob and a howl; she was actually trembling inside her armor. Arcade had never seen her so distraught, and it tore at his heart.

"You're _baiting_ her!" he shouted at the eye-bot. "By God, can't you leave her alone?!"

The eyebot swiveled toward him, and that laugh deepened.

"_You. I know you._ _Child of the last of the government that was, a sad, pale thing trying to keep alive a glory long since dead. Surprised she brought __**you**__ with her, at her side. Perhaps she didn't know what it was she was bringing. Get of the Enclave, follower of the Followers-three times a follower, in truth. What's between us doesn't concern you. This is a matter for Couriers."_

The breath rushed from Arcade's lungs as if he had been punched in the gut. The sound seemed to drain from the world; he could hear nothing besides Ulysses's rasping voice. As if from a vast distance he saw Samara's head turn toward him, saw those ice-pale eyes staring at him; her lips moved, but he could hear no words. The secret he had kept for so long, hidden from everyone, had been stripped from him suddenly and ruthlessly; he felt horribly exposed and vulnerable, more naked than naked. His first, almost overpowering impulse was to flee, to hide from Samara's penetrating eyes, but he couldn't move; his feet felt as if they were affixed the ground.

Ulysses was still going on, that overpowering, rasping voice rattling through the speakers of the eyebot, but it took a moment for the words to make sense to Arcade; they sounded like something in a foreign language that he could barely decipher. _"...know you're as tired of this as I am, Courier. Want an end to it, both of us, you and I, this long road we've walked together._"

"Then why not kill me now!?" Samara shouted at the eyebot.

"_Not the way of it. What kind of world would this be, if Courier killed Courier? No, I can't kill you...not yet at least. And I'm thinking-you can't kill me either."_

That low, rumbling growl rolled out of Samara's throat again. "Oh, I promise you, you are _so_ wrong."

Again that low, harsh laugh. Samara snarled in fury, but controlled herself this time. _"Perhaps. Perhaps you can...but you won't. At least, not until you've walked this road to the end. Seen the damage you've done. Till we've stood face to face, looked into each other's eyes, taken each other's measure." _ Ulysses paused. _"You're tough, like the roads you travel. Thought the Chip would do you in, the Mojave would drag you down, down into the dust. Yet you survived it. Rose above__**. Superabatis**__-there's a word for __**you**__, Follower, if you like it._ _Yes, you're tough-but the Divide may be tougher. Suppose we'll see."_

"Where are you?" Samara ground out.

"_Walk the Divide. Walk the wreckage. America lies sleeping ahead of you-what it was, what it has become, all wrapped in dreams or nightmares. You'll find the path I left for you-the markings, the colors, to show you the road ahead. I know it. I have faith in you, Courier." _Even in his paralysis, Arcade sensed that shadowed contempt-and something else, something he could not quite identify. _"You'll find them, find the blockages along the road. Not my doing, but there, nonetheless. There's a way. America's spears sleep in the Divide, in the wreckage they created, some beneath the soil; some above. Find the key-the detonator. It will bring you to me."_

Samara's teeth bared in a snarl. "Fine. I'll find this detonator, then I'll find you. But you better hope you have enough ammo when I _kick down your door!_"

"_Road gets rougher from here on out. I'll meet you at the end of the trail-__**if **__you survive."_ And with that ED-E chirped, and the low hissing crackle of the open intercom cut off. The silence that followed-broken only by the sound of the wind-seemed very loud indeed.

Arcade could not move. He was almost immobilized with fear. His eyes clung to Samara's face, awaiting her response, but her face was granite; he could read nothing there. The thought surfaced that he'd fought Deathclaws and been less afraid. Silence hung suspended between them, like a fragile object on the verge of shattering.

At long last, she moved, and Arcade flinched back, thinking she was going to raise her weapon; but she just jerked her head down toward the village below. "Are you coming, or just gonna stand there all day?"

Arcade wet his lips. "Samara, um-" His hands were cold and clammy, and there was a sick tightness in his chest. He could barely form the words; speaking felt like he was heaving boulders. He swallowed, hard. "Ah...wh-what he said...About, ah, about-m-me and the Enclave-"

"_Stop," _Samara ground out.

Arcade cut himself off at once.

"_Look_ at me. Look me in the eye."

His fists clenched and unclenched. He steeled his spine. Her gaze seared into him.

"_Answer me,"_ she ordered him. "Are you planning to stab me in the back?"

"No," he said immediately. "No, of course not."

"Then _don't say anything else._" He should have been comforted, but there was nothing comforting in that iron-hard voice. "I can't deal with it right now. I can't-I can't afford to be distracted. Later, when we get back to the Mojave, I might have some questions for you. But _not now_."

Arcade bit his lip, exhaled slowly. "Fair enough." He tried not to think about their return to the Mojave.

She studied him a moment more. "So _that's_ your secret," she said.

Arcade was silent.

Samara snorted in disgust. "Come on. We need to go find that detonator thing." She turned away and started down the long grade to the slope below. After a moment to collect himself, Arcade followed at her heels.


	2. Chapter 2

He trailed after Samara as she descended the long slope to the decaying barracks below. There was still a queasy tightness in his gut-an aftereffect of having his shroud of secrecy ripped from him-but at the same time, a strange sense of lightness, almost giddiness, pervaded him; it was a while before he could recognize it as relief. His secret was out...and Samara hadn't turned on him, hadn't repudiated him, hadn't attempted to attack him. _She knows, and she doesn't care._ He'd been hiding the secret for so long, and in the end, it turned out to be nothing.

The two of them made their way down the sloping hillside, past an overturned army truck and across a broken roadway until they found themselves in among a set of ruined wooden barracks. A billboard stood near the road, heavily weathered and canted at a crazy angle; it was so faded and battered that it was almost illegible, but he could make out what seemed to be the image of a flag. Over this were superimposed the words: _America's Bright Future in __YOUR__ Hands!_ Arcade winced at the sight.

Samara passed right by it without a glance. She surveyed the wreckage around them. Huge piles of rubble lay everywhere, in and among the ruined barracks; several buildings were half-buried, and far in the distance, faded to pastel by the constantly blowing wind and sand in the air, there were the jagged stumps of skyscrapers and overpasses.

"This is _bad_," she said.

"This damage-this is more than just decay." He frowned. "Was all this done in the war, do you think?"

Samara shook her head. "Most of this looks more recent. See all the rubble? The collapsed buildings?" she asked, taking in the entire vista of wreckage with a sweep of her arm. "Whatever wrecked this place came from underground."

"Underground. God damn." He thought of the sign they'd seen back at the missile base entrance-_Building the American Dream ... On Solid Ground!_- and rubbed at his eyes with the back of one hand. They watered slightly; grit from the ever-blowing wind had gotten in them. "Maybe that's what he meant by 'America's spears' and the 'wreckage they created.'"

"Maybe," was Samara's only response.

"Our little friend just enjoys being cryptic, doesn't he?" Arcade mused. He started to catch himself, concerned that he was talking too much-but then realized that it didn't matter what he said. Samara already knew everything; there was nothing to hide from her anymore. He didn't need to avoid calling attention to himself, or carefully monitor everything he said to make sure it didn't lead to questions he didn't want to answer. The sensation was heady, almost intoxicating. "I'm almost afraid to speculate what that 'detonator' is and why he wants you to find it."

Samara surveyed the devastation slowly. After a moment, she pointed. "I think I know."

Smashed up against the door of one of the barracks, buried in a pile of rubble, lay what was unmistakably an undetonated atomic warhead.

"_Jesus Christ."_ Arcade stepped backward involuntarily. A primal, atavistic fear swept over him, as if he had just spotted a venomous serpent. He realized that he was shivering; gooseflesh had risen on his arms where they were left bare by his armor. "He can't-" He glanced at Samara, then quickly back to the weapon; his eyes were _drawn_ to it as if by magnetic attraction. "You don't mean he wants us to-"

Samara's eyes narrowed. "I'm guessing there's a warhead up ahead blocking the path somewhere and that's the one we've got to detonate to get through."

"Samara-" Arcade turned toward her in alarm. "You're not actually going to _do_ this, Samara, are you?"

"All I care about is finding Ulysses." Her jaw set.

"But Samara, you-"

She turned to look at him, and he fell silent.

"Come on." She started off, ED-E following. After a moment, Arcade went after her, his insides churning.

They wound their way among the barracks until they came to another broken road that passed through a gap in a bent and buckled chainlink fence. The wind lashed their faces with sand and grit; Arcade had to blink it out of his eyes and rub them heavily with the backs of his hands to see clearly. The gap in the fence through which the road passed was flanked by two more wrecked army trucks; and on a fragment of concrete was stenciled the same symbol they had seen at the top of the mountains-the stylized flag with the stars and stripes, only a different color this time.

"Why is this one red?" he wondered aloud.

"Danger," Samara said succinctly. She put her hand on the stock of her LAER rifle, and her face tightened. "Be cautious."

On the other side of the chainlink fence, the road ran past a blocky, concrete building off to the left and then on through a line of steel Quonset huts. Some distance beyond were the remains of what must have been the shopping district for the base town: ruined brick storefronts with boarded-up or vacant doors and gaping windows; crumbling, formerly majestic concrete structures that perhaps had once been banks, town halls, or government buildings. Wrecked vehicles, both civilian and military, were everywhere: crashed cars, overturned trucks; even a couple of long, jackknifed semis spilling barrels and crates out onto the ruined asphalt. The overcast sky threw lurid, gloomy shadows over it all; the wind blew without respite. It was one of the most desolate places Arcade had ever seen.

The only sounds were their footsteps and the moaning of the wind. From time to time they came upon bodies of the same red, flayed look as the one in the missile silo; these were not posed, but simply lay where they had fallen. A few of the walls had graffiti scrawled on them: mostly meaningless doodles, a few oddly disconnected, plangent phrases that were somehow disturbing in their strange emptiness, like stones dropped into a hollow well.

_Where is everyone?_ one scrawl read, looping unevenly over the bricks of a shattered storefront.

A block or so later, as if in answer to the first phrase, they came across _D-E-A-D_, spelled out in vertical capital letters on the side of what might have once been a bank.

"'_I feel fine_'?" Arcade murmured, tracing words along the roof of an overturned semi. Something about the words gave him a chill. He wrapped his arms around himself, then turned to glance at Samara. "These are relatively fresh."

"What makes you say that?"

"Feel the wind? All the sand blowing around? If they'd been done too long ago, they'd have weathered away." He rubbed at his eyes again, trying to blink the grit out of them.

"How old do you think they are?" Samara asked.

Arcade shrugged. "Dunno. But at the very least, these weren't done in the immediate postwar period. The last few months or so, maybe even the last few weeks."

He watched Samara's face tighten as she absorbed that. "Come on," she said. "We need to keep moving." She motioned him onward, and did not ask the obvious question: _Who did them?_

Aside from the graffiti and the occasional bodies, there were no other signs of recent human presence. All the same, Arcade felt the skin on the back of his neck crawling. He could not shake the feeling that they were being watched.

"We are," Samara said when he mentioned it. She nodded to her PIP-Boy 3000. "Life signs, not too far off. Why they're not coming out to play, I have no idea."

Arcade digested that with an inward chill. "Maybe they don't know we're here."

Samara gave an awkward, jerky shrug. "If they don't know we're here after Ulysses, they've got to be deaf. The whole Divide could probably hear that." She glanced at her PIP-Boy again. "Doesn't matter. If they don't show up, fine; if they do, we'll take 'em out then."

Samara forged ahead through the ruined downtown area with solid, purposeful strides, as if she knew exactly where she was going. From time to time, she would stop and check her PIP-Boy 3000, though Arcade had no idea what she was looking for, and then set off in a new direction. He followed at her heels, his skin prickling, senses hyperalert. The eyebot bobbed along, usually behind Samara, though it sometimes darted ahead, the humming of its motor loud in the silence. Along the way, they came across more of those stylized flag markings, in white, blue or red, marking out the path to follow; Samara greeted each one with a stony nod.

"Bastard's marking the path for us. Good. That'll only make things easier."

As they wound their way deeper into the ruins, they began to come across what could only be described as campsites. Areas where fire circles had been made out of broken bricks, with battered, splintery chairs and foot lockers drawn up around them. Arcade glanced at one of the circles and saw that in addition to the usual chunks of wood culled from the wreckage, there were charred, blackened books, that had clearly been used for kindling. His jaw tightened. _In absentia luci, tenebrae vincunt,_ he thought grimly.

Scattered beyond the campsites were several beehive-shaped piles of blocks that Arcade at first took for more heaps of rubble; it was not until they passed by one more closely that he saw the opening on one side. _Huts,_ he realized. _These are stone huts. _

"Samara-look, there are-"

She gestured sharply without turning. "Not now. We're close." Her head was down and she was gazing at her PIP-Boy 3000 screen. With a sigh, Arcade followed her.

She strode down the street another block or so, past a few more abandoned cars and twisted lamp posts, until she came to what appeared to have once been a ruined two-story brick apartment building. After consulting her PIP-Boy 3000, Samara jerked her head toward the building. "In there."

The doors and windows to the building were empty gaping frames like hollow eye sockets, and a whole section of the wall had crumbled inward; Samara stepped over the threshold into the interior, and then climbed the concrete stairs to the second floor. A fallen slab of concrete provided a ramp to the roof. Most of the roof had fallen in long ago, but in one corner a segment was preserved. The section had been turned into a small aerie: a mattress lay on the roof with a chair and footlocker nearby and several boxes of ammo. Samara went straight to the footlocker and threw it open; inside, resting on a litter of ammo and MREs and bottles of water and other trinkets, was a square, dull-green rectangular weapon with a truncated barrel.

"This is it," she said, holding it aloft.

Something about the dull green metal gave Arcade a chill: it looked almost hostile in the lurid, overhead light. "Samara, are you really-"

She waved him to silence, checking her PIP-Boy 3000 and then looking over the edge of the roof. She traced a line on her PIP-Boy, muttering briefly to herself, then looked up. "South. We need to go south. Come on."

Without so much as a word, she began climbing down from the roof. Her eyebot darted after her almost eagerly. Arcade wondered if she'd even notice if he didn't follow.

As he picked his way down the heap of debris after her, he caught sight of another billboard off in the distance, canted at a crazy angle and skewered by a jagged, rusty girder. _Our Hope For Our Children_, this one said. Arcade grimaced and looked away. The billboards weren't funny anymore, even as black humor.

[*]

They made their way south through the silent, eerie streets, following the remains of a road through the wreckage of downtown and past the chain-link fence that defined the outer limits of the old base. The eyebot bobbed behind them, a silent witness. The road led back past the rusting Quonset huts to a high concrete wall with a gap in it for the road to pass through. The gap was with a mountainous jumble of building fragments, old cars, metal girders, concrete and boulders. In the middle of it all was a large warhead, sitting smugly like an egg in a nest. Next to it was another one of those damned flag symbols-in red.

Samara's mouth tightened in a grim half-smile. She looked down at her PIP-Boy 3000.

"Get ready," she said without sparing Arcade a glance. "They're all beyond there-swarming like ants. When I blow this thing, it's going to get crazy."

Arcade started to say something, then pressed his lips together. He sighed instead. "Fine."

The three of them-Arcade on the left, the eyebot on the right, and Samara herself in the center-took up a position behind a huge pile-up of ruined cars close to the entrance. From within her armor, she pulled a small bottle of Rad-X, and dispensed a couple pills for herself and for Arcade. They tasted bitter, and Arcade's throat was so tight he had a hard time swallowing them, knowing what was to come. Once they all were ready, Samara caught his eye meaningfully and then donned her helmet. There was a hiss and a clicking noise as it sealed home.

_Here we go. Again._

Cursing Samara in his heart, Arcade drew his Plasma Defender as she produced the laser detonator. She aimed it at the warhead, and pulled the trigger. A beam of sizzling, red laser light lanced out, blazing green afterimages across his vision, and Arcade had just enough time to drop to one knee behind the rusting car heap and turn his face away from the blast.

There was a flash of white light and then a thunderous, deafening roar that shook the ground beneath him. Arcade saw chunks of shrapnel; then the whole, huge carcass of a car hurtled over his head and crashed into a storefront, which collapsed in a shower of dust. He could hear the Geiger counter built into Samara's PIP-Boy 3000 clicking like mad.

"_Here they come!"_ Samara's electronic, synthesized voice rang out, and the eye-bot broke into the short phrase of music that signified the presence of enemies. Gripping his Plasma Defender, Arcade swung back to the front to deal with the threat.

The barrier was gone. Where it had been was now a blackened crater, a huge breach blasted into the cement walls. Smoke and dust filled the air, great billowing clouds, obscuring whatever lay beyond. And out of that dust, indistinct shapes were appearing-a score at least, possibly even more-howling and snarling as they came.

Even before they were fully visible, Samara was coolly lining up her shots. Bright blue beams of laser light lanced out from her LAER, as she fired with almost mechanical speed and precision at the shrouded forms, picking them off one by one as they swarmed through the smoke. Arcade scrambled to do the same, aiming the barrel of his Plasma Defender into the dust, shooting as fast as he could pull the trigger, and above them both, the eyebot sent its lightning bolts leaping among the attackers. As the dust began to settle and the wave of enemies surging toward them drew nearer, Arcade saw they the same flayed creatures as the bodies they'd been finding all over the site-only these were alive. They wore shabby, patched armor, carrying weapons that looked as if they were going to fall apart in a stiff breeze. Bullets snapped and zinged all around, but without any great accuracy; Arcade guessed by the condition of their weapons that the only way they'd be able to hit either him or Samara was by accident.

"_Arcade! ED-E! Close up around me!" _ Samara's voice rang out as the first few flayed opponents began to get to melee distance. Arcade swore viciously, holstering his Plasma Defender and snatching his Ripper chainblade from his waist. The weapon gave a snarl as he powered it up, and the vibrations shook his hands. His gut was twisted in sick knots. Samara had taken out the strange axe with the glowing, dark blue blade that she had carried with her ever since she had come back from one of her jaunts-she called it the _protonic inversal axe,_ he remembered distantly. Electricity crackled up and down the weapon's blade. There was no sign visible in her armored form of the dread Arcade felt; instead, something about her stance suggested readiness, even _eagerness. _Then Arcade had no more time to look at her, because the first of the enemies were upon them.

The next few moments were a confused whirl of stabbing and slashing with his chainblade, ducking and frantically trying to avoid blows, hearing the snarling, raging cries of those they fought, and Samara's own high shrieks of fury. His chainblade roared in his ears, and the vibrations shook his hands all the way into the bones. The eye-bot stabbed arcs of lightning into the swirling battle below; more lightning danced among the fray from Samara's inversal axe, as its glowing blue blade severed skulls and cleaved limbs from bodies. Arcade had all he could do to stay alive, let alone pay attention to his companions; it wasn't until he yanked his Ripper blade out from the torso of a doomed opponent and drew a breath, wiping a smear of blood off his forehead with one arm, that he realized all the others around them were down.

_Thank God._ Suddenly his legs were trembling with weakness. He dropped to one knee, breathing hard his gaze wandering uncomprehendingly over the bodies strewn before him. _How many-_ He remembered, not opponents but weapons: there had been one with a huge sword, almost as tall as its bearer; another wielding a Super Sledge, a third with a combat knife- _More than that. There had to be more than that._ Perhaps there were, but he could not remember them.

His chainblade was still sputtering in his hands; he flicked the switch off, and saw that blood stained the housing. His hands still trembled; they were red and sticky, all the way up his wrist guards. More blood spattered across his battered armor, and checking with his eyes, he saw nicks and gouges that had not been there before. Quickly, almost automatically, he patted himself all over, making sure that he was unwounded. His stomach was still churning at the sight of so much violence-at the thought that he had taken part in it-and unbidden, it came to him that he had never participated in such things before he had begun following Samara.

_Samara-_ A sudden jolt went through him and he heaved himself unsteadily to his feet, scanning for her frantically through the smoke and dust.

"Samara-?" he called. "Are you all right?"

His eyes found her: Samara was standing in the middle of the carnage, her Power Armor dripping. Blood sizzled along the blade of her inversal axe as she gazed beyond the smoking crater and down the road ahead. For a long moment, she did not answer, and Arcade wondered if she had even heard him; but then she seemed to come back to reality. She reached up and removed her helmet, and her eyes met his.

"Arcade," she said slowly. "Are you hurt?"

"I'm fine. You?"

Those pale eyes turned inward. "I'm okay. Check the bodies," she ordered peremptorily, gesturing toward the bodies of the dead that lay around them. "See if they have anything good."

Without further ado, she promptly suited action to word, going down on one armored knee beside a fallen enemy and beginning to roughly check it over. Muttering under his breath, Arcade followed suit.

The body before him was tall, probably as tall as he was, but much more robust: broader of shoulder with heavy, cable-like muscles visible where the armor left limbs bare. A deep gash from Arcade's blade cleft his chest. Like the man they had seen pinned to the wall in the missile silo, like the other bodies they had come upon scattered in the streets, this individual had the appearance of one who had been flayed alive: the red ropes of sinew and tendon were visible, but dry and hard to the touch. Like a ghoul, the man had no nose or ears, and his open eyes were milky, cataract-white. As Arcade leaned over him, there was the faintest twitch of the man's exposed facial musculature.

"This one's still alive."

Samara straightened from the man she had been checking over. "What?"

"He's breathing." Arcade held his metal-and-ceramic wrist guard over the hole in the downed man's face where his nose had been, and watched it fog up. "See?"

"Not for long." Samara's jaw tightened and her pale eyes hardened again. She began to advance on the fallen man, reaching into her armor and pulling out the 10mm pistol she had taken from General Retslaf. She clicked the safety off. "Clear the shot."

Another chill ran down Arcade's spine. "Put that _away,_ Samara," he snapped at her. On the spur of the moment, he reached into his armor and took out a stimpak. "I'm going to try and bring him around."

He turned to the man lying beside him, hearing the click as Samara put the safety back on. "What?" she asked in confusion. "_Why?_"

"Why not? We can try and talk to him, at least."

He heard her armor servos whine as she shifted restlessly, and the eyebot beeped above her. When she spoke, it was with a strange diffidence. "Arcade...why bother?" He glanced up at her and saw her brows were furrowed again, as if confronting a puzzle. "I mean, I-I'm pretty sure these guys are some kind of feral ghouls. I don't think they're sentient-"

"They're _not_ like ferals," Arcade snapped. "Look, have you ever seen a feral ghoul wear armor?"

"No, but-" Samara began.

"Use weapons?"

"Well-no, but I don't-"

"Build _huts_, for Christ's sake?"

"They build huts?" she asked, baffled.

"Weren't you _listening_ to me back there?" Arcade demanded. "Yes, they build stone huts. Now I ask you-do you think a feral could do that?"

"No," Samara acknowledged, still frowning.

"Exactly. Thank you." Arcade examined the downed form before him, searching for the best place to apply the stimpak. "There's something-some _one_-in there, Samara. If we can just bring him around-"

That furrow between Samara's brows deepened. "Fiends are sentient too, but whenever we fought them you never tried to bring one of them around."

"If we wake this guy up and he understands us, we can talk to him-ask him questions about what we're up against, at least. Don't you think that would be useful?" he challenged her.

"And if he can't or won't talk to us?"

"Then we're no worse off than we are now. Look, we can at least _try_, can't we?" He selected a spot on the red, flayed man's neck. "Here goes."

"Wait." Samara's metal-gauntleted fingers closed on Arcade's shoulder. She was still holding the pistol on the man. "Move aside."

"What the hell are you doing?"

"If you want to bring him around, fine, but I'm not going to risk your life for this. If he wakes up and starts threatening you-" Her eyes hardened. "I'm going to shoot."

Arcade gauged the usefulness of arguing with her against those stony features and sighed. "Fine. Just don't interfere." And he placed the stimpak against the fallen man's neck. The needle jabbed straight into the muscle and the plunger depressed. Arcade sat back on his heels, watching.

Slowly, the main's breathing strengthened and tone returned to his muscles. The gash in his chest began to close, bit by bit, fading to a raw, angry-looking weal. Arcade guessed the radiation in the area probably helped as well; he could still hear the Geiger counter built into Samara's PIP-Boy 3000 clicking away in the background, and tried distantly not to think about how many rads he was taking, even with the protective effect of the Rad-X. At length, the man opened his eyes. When he saw Arcade bending over him, he tensed. His hand started to creep down by his side, when Samara cocked her pistol. She took a step forward, her heavy tread ringing on the pavement, and the man's eyes went to her.

"Don't move."She was glowering at him. "Do you understand me? _Don't. Move."_ She repeated the words, clear and distinct, shoving the gun at him, making sure he could see it. The man let out a long, slow hiss.

"Under...stand," he said slowly, as if having to dredge the word up from a long disused portion of his brain. His voice was raspy, grating. "No...move."

Samara snorted in disgust, though she didn't take her eyes off the man for an instant. "He's all yours, Arcade."

_Great._ Arcade sighed. He drew a breath, considering how to proceed. Samara said nothing more, clearly seeing the whole thing as his affair; she simply continued to watch the man, holding her weapon steady.

_And the man is watching her,_ Arcade realized suddenly. The flayed man had glanced at Arcade briefly when he'd first come around, but when he'd caught sight of Samara, she had suddenly become the focus of his whole attention. Even now, he was studying her closely, as if trying to figure something out. _It could be just because she's holding a weapon on him,_ Arcade mused...but somehow, there seemed to be more to it than that.

Memories of time spent working with some of the more isolated tribes came to mind-in the real backwoods places, the version of English the inhabitants spoke had undergone so much change that it was almost a different language and communication was exceedingly difficult. He leaned forward, catching the man's eye.

"Arcade," he said, tapping his chest, then gestured toward Samara. "Samara." He indicated the man. "You?"

The man again glanced at him briefly and then returned his gaze to Samara. His ruined face twitched in a grimace that might have meant anything. "Sa...ma...ra?"

Arcade sighed. "Yes. She's Samara. You?" he asked again, and once more indicated the man.

The man's grimace deepened. "No. Not...Samara. Wal...ker."

_What? _"Walker?"

"She...Walker. She...bringer. No..." He shook his head. "Not...bringer. She...He say..." His jaw twisted, and some gurgled sounds came from that ruined throat, sounds that perhaps approximated "_Courier."_

Arcade glanced at Samara quickly, but she showed no reaction, simply holding her weapon on the man. He sighed again. "Yes. Some people call her the Courier. Who are _you_?" he asked again.

The man gave a rough, choking noise that Arcade almost recognized as a laugh. "Blis...ter."

"Blister? Your name is Blister?" At the man's nod, Arcade frowned. "I'm guessing that's not the name you were born with."

Blister gave that choking, gurgled laugh again. "Born. Yes. Born..._here._ Blis...ter."

"You were born here?"

"Born...two times." He held up two fingers to demonstrate. "Second...here."

_Second here?_ Arcade glanced at Samara, who shrugged slightly. Blister was still watching her with that fixed gaze. "What do you mean, you were born two times?"

Blister ignored him. "You. Walker," he said to Samara instead. His voice was awful, a horrible, wet, rasping gurgle; each word, each _syllable_ sounded as if it were physically painful. If he had been Arcade's patient back at the Old Mormon Fort, Arcade would have diagnosed him with double pneumonia based on the sound of his voice alone. "We. Know ... you. Before ones...know...you."

Samara's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?" she asked suspiciously. Blister just laughed again, the watery sound of a diver with a bad rebreather.

"_Hey,"_ Arcade interposed, leaning into Blister's field of vision. "You said you were born twice. What do you mean? Where were you born the first time?"

Blister didn't take his eyes from Samara's face. "You...me...answer ... him?"

Samara's face twisted in confusion. "Why are you asking me? Yes. Answer him. He's my friend."

Blister hissed in something like disgust, but turned his attention to Arcade again. "You. Walker. Of...Bear."

The NCR. _Of course._ "No, not exactly-"

"Me...Bull." And he gestured to indicate horns. "Born...of Bull. East. To...East. First time."

"_Legionary."_ Arcade couldn't repress a shudder at the sheer level of loathing in Samara's voice. She said the word as if it were an obscenity. Her face hardened as she steadied her weapon.

"Put the damned thing _down_, Samara," he snapped. "You said he was all mine, well, let _me_ handle this." As she hesitated, uncertain, he needled her, "Besides, I thought you said the Legion wasn't your fight anymore."

Her glower made him wish he'd kept his mouth shut, but she relaxed a fraction; still, he could see the stone in her eyes. He turned back to the man.

"You were with the Legion?"

"Le...gion. Yes," Blister gurgled. "Le...gion. _En...See...Arr._ These words...long ago. Bear...Bull... No more. Now..._Marked Men._"

"Marked Men," Arcade repeated, frowning. "That's what you call yourself?"

"_All_...Marked Men." Blister stretched out one red arm to encompass the whole Divide. "Once Bear. Once Bull. Gone. Only...Marked Men...Now."

Arcade turned and looked back at Samara, who shifted her eyes fractionally to him. "The armies that met in the Divide," he said. "No one ever knew what became of them."

Samara nodded. "These...Marked Men...must be the survivors."

Blister gave a wet, painful-sounding laugh. "She...knows. Wal...ker. Sa...ma...ra. She...there."

Samara froze. "_What. Do. You. Mean."_

Arcade waved her to silence. "What happened here?"

The Marked Man hissed. "_Fire..._" he breathed out. "Great...fire."

"Explain."

Blister was silent for a long moment, casting his milky eyes down. Crude spasms crossed his rudely disfigured face. It seemed as if the Marked Man were excavating his memory, searching through rusting, disused scraps of his brain to produce an answer to Arcade's question-as if there were such a vast gulf between what he had been and what he now was that his prior experiences were almost inaccessible. At last, slowly, he raised his eyes to Arcade.

"We came. Here. We came...Legion..._En See Arr_...Together. To...this place. _Divide_. We came...to..." He cast his eyes down again. "_Fight,"_ he said at last, as if just now remembering.

Arcade glanced at Samara. "Makes sense-the NCR wanted this Divide for their supply lines, and Caesar's Legion wanted to cut them off."

"_Supply lines._ Yessss..." Blister hissed, and laughed again. "We came...To fight. Here...people. Town. A town..." He nodded again toward Samara. "Sheee...made. Wal...ker. Sa...ma...ra. She...made...town."

Arcade turned back to stare at his companion. "_You_? You...made a town?"

"I don't remember _any_ of this!" Samara shouldered forward, holding her pistol on the Marked Man. "What the _hell_ are you talking about?"

"Town...You made..." Blister's eyes moved past Arcade as if he no longer existed. "You made. Made ... path. People...come. Live. You...keep. Keep tied...desert. Keep...alive. You. You..._Courier._"

"That's_ bullshit," _Samara snarled, furious.

"You. Town. Town...love you. Honor...you. We come."

Samara looked about ready to interject some more questions; Arcade interrupted in an effort to keep things moving. "Okay. So there was apparently a town here that had some connection with Samara-" the black expression on Samara's face deepened "-and the Legion and the NCR came here to fight over it." He could not repress a snort. "Sounds like them."

"Which?" Samara asked.

"Both," he replied rather tartly. He looked back at Blister. "What happened to the town? And what about Ulysses? Where does he come in?"

"Ul...yss..eeesss..." Something akin to reverence seemed to cross the Marked Man's face. "_Wan...der...er._"

"Yes, where does he fit in?"

Blister's flayed face seemed to twist. "Not...speak. Wanderer's...name. Bad...bad luck. Not speak. Wan...der...er. He hear...he know."

"He can't hear you now, I assure you," Arcade said. "How does he fit in? Can you tell me?"

That strange expression crossed over Blister's face, like the shadow of fear. "Close..." he breathed. "Close...in. No one ... hear. _Sheeee..._" He glanced at Samara. "Sheee...not hear."

"Anything you can say to me, you can say to her," Arcade argued, seeing Samara's displeased expression, but Blister shook his head.

"You. Lean in. Close. She... not hear."

Samara nodded, and Arcade leaned in.

"Closer..." breathed Blister. "Closer..."

He leaned in closer. "Say it?"

The Marked Man's ruined features twitched, twisted. He put his left hand on Arcade's shoulder-

And two pistol shots cracked out. The top of the Marked Man's head exploded in a rain of flesh, blood, bone and brain matter; his long, lean body jerked and then fell away, his fingers releasing Arcade's shoulder.

"_What the hell!?_" Arcade leapt to his feet, spinning on Samara, his hand going automatically to the stock of his gun. He was shaking; the pistol shots so close to him, so close to his ear, had dumped a shitload of adrenaline into his system. A bright flash of rage and fear filled him. He could feel Blister's blood stippling his cheek. "Samara, what the _fuck_ do you think you're _doing?! _What the hell-He was _talking,_ he wasn't-"

Samara was standing there, looking at him and holding General Retslaf's 10mm in her hand, the barrel still smoking. She nodded toward Blister. "He had a knife. You didn't see it."

Still shaking, Arcade turned to look down at Blister's corpse. True to what Samara had said, a combat knife lay by Blister's outstretched right hand; he had clearly just pulled it from within his armor. _When he told me to get closer-_ The knife's blade gleamed dully in the dim light from the overcast sky. Again, Samara glanced downward, shifting awkwardly.

"I told you I wasn't going to risk your life," she offered, sounding almost like she expected to be scolded again.

Arcade swallowed hard; his stomach was roiling. Everything seemed nonsensical. He started, automatically, to wipe at the blood he could feel trickling down his face, but when he saw the red still staining his hands from the melee, he abruptly jerked them down. He wanted to be sick.

"Are you all right?" he heard Samara ask. "Did he get you?"

"Give me a minute." He waved at her, and she fell silent as he tried to collect himself. _What the hell is wrong with me?_ he found himself wondering. _I've been close to death before...but now...?_

But he'd just been talking with Blister not half a second before Samara shot him. They'd literally been in the middle of a conversation...he'd been close enough that the man's brains had splashed him.

_Goddamn you, Samara,_ he thought with real venom, as again it occurred to him that he had never been in these kinds of situations before he'd known turned on her, wanting to take a piece out of her; but when he saw her standing there, looking at him so awkwardly, something about her diffidence disarmed him. His own eyes dropped to the knife, still gleaming, and he muttered a curse. She had saved his life, after all.

"Thank you," he said in a low voice.

Samara nodded. "Come on," she said, nodding toward the shattered, gaping hole in the concrete wall. "We have to get moving."

[*]

Beyond the wall was a nightmare jumble of huge, shattered blocks. Chunks of concrete taller than a man lay piled on each other at jagged angles, creating a nearly impassable wasteland. Arcade thought that he was looking at the remains of a highway overpass, but that was no more than a guess. The wreckage was colossal; he felt like a child facing the ruins of some giant's castle. He turned to ask Samara how they were to get through that, but his companion simply forged ahead, her eyebot following her.

They climbed down over a sharply-angled concrete slab with faded highway markings-Arcade missed his grip and skidded the last few feet, scraping his hands-and then picked their way slowly through the rubble to where a car fallen at a slanted angle provided a bridge to a lip of undamaged roadway jutting out over their heads, stark black against the sky. The car shifted uneasily as they stepped off it onto the concrete, and they found themselves staring at an overpass arch that seemed to open onto a shadowed cave or tunnel. A jagged slab of concrete was propped up against the wall of the arch, with Ulysses' white symbol painted on it; next to it was another slab with the words, also in white: KEEP OUT.

"Through there," Samara said. That stony distance was creeping back into her eyes.

Arcade nodded to the two slabs of concrete. "Our friend appears to have a serious case of mixed signals."

"It doesn't matter. Or rather, it won't when I find him," she said, and plunged under the archway.

[*]

The tunnel beneath the overpass was a cave of gloom and shadows. The scent of dust and decay was everywhere. The sky above was completely blocked by huge chunks of pavement; only a few glimmering shafts of light filtered down to them through the cracks in their concrete roof. Their surroundings were just as chaotic as they had been outside: great mounds of rubble bulking darkly in the twilight, overturned and smashed cars and trucks protruding at different angles. A whole brick building that had probably once been some sort of store was almost completely buried. It was staggering to consider the forces that had wrought such destruction.

There was something spooky about the dull murkiness surrounding them. The darkness felt almost alive, as if it were breathing. _Watching us. Something's out there._ Arcade could sense it...he held his breath instinctively, not wanting to make the slightest noise-

"_Ulysses! Ulysses, can you hear me!? Come on out and fight!"_ Samara's shout rang throughout the tunnel, bouncing echoes back from the distant reaches of the darkness.

"Samara, Jesus, _quiet!" _Arcade hissed. She was standing taut, staring into the gloom as if she could pierce the space between her and her quarry with her eyes alone. "_No_, Ulysses can't hear you_, _of course he can't, but whatever else is in here can hear you _just fine!_"

"Let them come. I'm not afraid of them. All I care about is Ulysses." Her face was set, and she fingered her weapon; Arcade suddenly had a visual of her charging a stone wall at full speed. _And to be honest, I'd only give even odds to the wall._ He drew a breath.

"I know that, Samara, but can't you at least see the need for stealth? There could be things here-"

A low growl rolled out of the dark.

Samara raised her LAER rifle and Arcade aimed his plasma defender, cursing Samara under his breath. _Like that, see, like that,_ he wanted to say, but held his tongue. The two of them backed toward each other. Another growl came, from somewhere up ahead; but the echoes bounced and reverberated so greatly that it was impossible to tell exactly where it originated from or how far away it was. Arcade risked a quick glance over at Samara, and saw that she was studying her PIP-Boy 3000.

Taking a tight grip on his urge to throttle her, he asked, "Do you see anything?"

"Nothing. ED-E hasn't detected anything either," she said, nodding toward the eyebot. She straightened her shoulders. "We head on. Further in."

"Samara, do you hear the growling?" The echoes were still chasing each other in the corners of the tunnel. "Do you _hear_ that? I know your PIP-Boy doesn't detect everything-if it's something like night-stalkers, then-"

"Then we'll kill it when it shows itself," she said, her eyes hardening. "Come on."

"Samara, _think_ for a moment. Anything could be out there, we don't know what it can do-"

She turned and looked at him, and he broke off. "Fine," he said with a sigh. "After you."

As they threaded their way through the piles of wreckage, Arcade was tense and jumpy, expecting them to be attacked at any moment; but nothing happened. Low growls drifted out of the dark now and then, and from time to time, something clattered far off in the shadows, but whatever was there seemed content to do nothing more than watch.

_For now, anyway,_ he thought grimly.

There was no order to the overpass tunnel; they had to pick their way among the debris, and were forced to back up a number of times and seek an alternate route. As they rounded the edge of an overturned semi truck, Samara touched his arm.

"Look," she said.

Arcade turned, raising his weapon by instinct, and then stopped. By the light of her PIP-Boy 3000, he could see a body sprawled in the back of the trailer, arms flung wide, head turned to the side. The body was clad in damaged NCR Trooper armor; however, the armor was not patched, as on the corpses they'd seen earlier, and though there wasn't much of the face left, there was enough to tell that this was not a Marked Man.

"A Trooper," he said. Her face had been clawed to unrecognizability, and jagged swipes extended down her throat, so deep that Arcade could see the white glint of her spinal column. A chill ran through him and he rested his hand again on the stock of his pistol. _Whatever killed her, it's still in here._

"Yes. ED-E, guard." Samara glanced up at the eyebot, which whistled acknowledgement, then knelt by the body. As she went through the soldier's pockets and then checked the armor, Arcade studied the trooper. She was stocky and solidly built with olive skin and short-cut brown hair. Arcade guessed that she probably had been young, maybe on her first deployment. He wondered at the life course that had brought her here, so far from California.

Samara rose to her feet, holding up a small gray firearm with a short barrel. "Looks like she had a flare gun. And here-" She handed him a couple of canisters. "Flashbangs. And I think here-" She pulled a sheet of yellow military flimsy from the soldier's armor. "It's orders of some kind." Arcade leaned over her shoulder as Samara unfolded the paper and held it under her PIP-Boy light.

"_At 0600 hours,"_ Samara read aloud, "_Bravo Team will conduct sweep-and-clear operations in advance of the main force. Early intelligence suggests the tunnels are only sparsely populated by small subterranean semi-humanoids, which are easily cowed by bright light and loud noises. Bravo team has been issued flashbang grenades for this purpose and is expected to meet minimal resistance."_

_Minimal resistance. _Arcade looked down at the dead trooper, her face clawed to ribbons, then at the canisters Samara had handed him. _Flashbangs. _ "God _damn_."

He hadn't meant to speakaloud, didn't realize he had until he saw Samara looking up at him, her brow furrowed. "Arcade...?" she asked.

He rubbed at his eyes again, surprised and rather disturbed by the depth of his bitterness. Samara was still watching him and he shook his head slightly. "Just...arrogance. Damned arrogance. The NCR think they know everything-"

"Well, we're not the NCR," Samara interrupted. "And we've got stuff with us a lot more deadly than flashbangs." She turned away from the downed woman without so much as a backward glance. "Come on, let's go."

A fairly decent migraine was starting in his right temple; Arcade gritted his teeth. "Of course. I didn't mean to interrupt your little quest for vengeance. By all means, lead the way."

She gave him a hard look, and for a brief moment, Arcade wondered if he'd gone too far; but then she turned away, striding forward into the dark. Arcade trailed after her, massaging the side of his head. It didn't seem to help much.

They continued on, deeper into the shadows of the concrete jungle. More growls and scuttlings followed their progress; Arcade found himself jumping at shadows. Samara didn't seem to be worried, he observed sourly, though she did stop and change out her microfusion cells for overcharged ones. Arcade silently followed her example; whatever was lurking out there, he wanted to be prepared.

Near a jackknifed, half-crushed semi truck, they came upon a few more bodies: two more troopers and a solid, broad-shouldered man in Ranger armor. Each of them had the same swiping claw marks raking them as the trooper had. Samara retrieved a few more flashbangs from their belts.

"See in there?" she asked, nodding to the back of the truck.

Arcade looked, and saw the tangled limbs and dun-colored hide of a Deathclaw. He felt himself shiver. "Could this be it?" he asked Samara. "What killed those troopers?"

Samara shook her head, biting her lip again. Above them, the eyebot whistled. "Look," she said, indicating the body.

Arcade followed the line of sight with his eyes. As he examined the Deathclaw's corpse more closely, he saw that it had been disemboweled. Its guts spilled out in a dark pile on the floor of the dented metal truck. He swallowed.

"NCR troopers didn't do that," he murmured.

"No. Nor Legionaries, either." Samara glanced over at him. "Stay close."

"You don't need to tell me twice." He followed after her with his hand on his weapon. Above them both, the eyebot hovered.

Near the exit, Samara tossed a truck door out of their way with her powered armor and pointed. "There."

Arcade peered through the gloom. The path before them slanted upward, to a jagged edge of broken concrete that was clearly part of a fallen highway overpass. A collapsed sign reading HIGHWAY ½ MILE canted at an angle that formed a sort of archway. Above them, more sharp edges of concrete sliced the night sky into jagged shapes.

"I see the symbol," he acknowledged. Ulysses's white symbol was stenciled on a slab of cement to the right. On the left was another splash of violent red graffiti, but neither of them acknowledged that...though he did see Samara's jaw tighten as her eyes fell on it. Then she frowned.

"Hey, what's that?"

Lurking beyond the splash of red graffiti was a strange mound of some sort. As they moved closer, Arcade saw that it seemed to be formed out of chunks of broken concrete that had been cemented together as if by some sort of glue. The mound was fairly sizeable-as high as Arcade's chest and probably the span of his arms across-and in the center of it was a perfectly round, human-sized hole. Samara strode toward it and Arcade followed more cautiously, raising his weapon.

"It looks like a burrow of some kind," he said.

"But what made it?" Samara asked. Steam was rising from the mouth of the burrow, a sickly greenish color; it smelled of sulfur and radiation. Arcade frowned, feeling his skin prickle.

"Whatever it was, it was _big. _Look at that hole. A person could pass through that easily."

"Yes. Or several people." She turned and looked at Arcade soberly. "Do you think we-"

The blast of music from the eyebot behind them made them both jump. The little bot blared its threat cue, only to have it cut off halfway through by a loud metal banging sound. Samara whirled-Arcade would never have thought that he could have seen anyone in armor move that fast-and cried out, "_ED-E!_ ED-E, are you-"

And then the threat was upon them.

The two of them were _instantly_ engulfed in melee. Arcade's Ripper was in his hands somehow, though he had no memory of drawing it. The chainblade coughed and roared as it sliced into dark, shadowed forms with broad shining eyes that seemed to glow as brightly as the moon. They just kept coming, more and more of them pouring over and around the mounds of concrete rubble in an endless river. His mind was still reeling from shock; Arcade hacked and slashed desperately, his knees shaky and his limbs weak as water. The vibrations from the Ripper made it feel like it was slipping out of his hands; his timing felt off, as if he were half a second behind the attackers and had to hurry to catch up. He could hear Samara screaming, yelling the foulest language he'd ever heard, shouting furious threats and raging about ED-E, but he couldn't dare to look at her; he was scrambling to keep up with the waves of enemies surrounding them.

He couldn't have counted how many there were. He felt their hot blood on his hands, their foul breath on his face, as he strove to stay alive just one second more. Claws raked across the back of his armor, knocking him off-balance; he barely managed to keep his footing as he wrestled his Ripper around to deal with the threat, only to run into a massive blow against his helmet that jarred him so badly he saw stars. He lashed out blindly in the direction of the attack, driven by the sharp, bright edge of fear even as he felt the blade make contact and heard the wet sound of his Ripper tearing into flesh: knowing that he couldn't keep this up much longer, any minute now would be the blow he didn't see-

Then he heard the sizzle of Samara's LAER weapon and a flare of blue-white fire blazed across his sight. When the after-images died away, he realized that he was standing in the middle of a pile of ashes, all that Samara's weapon left behind. All was quiet.

He drew a few shaking breaths, trying to steady himself. The ground was covered with dismembered, vaguely humanoid corpses, mixed with small mounds of ashes; at some point, he realized, Samara had gotten her rifle out. His hands and the housing of his Ripper chainblade were covered with fresh blood, greenish-black against the red stains from the Marked Men earlier. He saw her hulking form in the darkness. "Samara-"

She cut him off with a wave of one hand. _"ED-E!"_ It was a plaintive wail. She bounded across the shattered concrete subsurface to fall on her knees at the side of the eyebot. Within moments she had pried off the machine's access panel and was prodding frantically at its innards, sparing Arcade not so much as a glance. "ED-E, oh my God, ED-E-ED-E, be okay, please-"

A flare of irritation so strong it rose to anger spiked in Arcade's chest as he watched her working desperately away at the circuit boards and wiring of the machine's interior. _ What about __**me**__, Samara?_ he wanted to shout at her. _Do you even care? _He bit down on the response. Instead, he said sharply, "Samara, we can't stay here long. Let the eyebot go. More of those-those tunnelers might be along at any-"

"_I'm not leaving ED-E!"_ The words were a shout; Arcade stepped back. Clenching his fists, he turned away, staring out into the darkness around them. He still felt shaky and unbalanced, and the bright flare of anger had not subsided. He concentrated on breathing until he felt more in control of himself, as Samara worked away at the eyebot behind him.

To distract himself he turned his attention to the bodies of their attackers. The creatures that lay sprawled on the ground around them were roughly humanoid, but with dark green, scaly skin and hands much larger than human hands, tipped with sharp, long curving claws, like those of a mole-rat. _Guess now we know who that burrow back there belonged to. _He glanced up at it again, the hole in the pile of rubble with greenish smoke rising from its mouth; it matched the size of the creatures before him exactly. Their heads and shoulders bore short spikes-_perhaps for sensing in the darkness?_-and their eyes were enormous and a glowing white. They looked to be adapted for crouching and traveling on all fours, with their hind legs appearing permanently bent-_the possible beginnings of an evolutionary transition back to digitigrade locomotion?_

"Samara, have you seen-"

"_Not now!"_

"Geez, fine, whatever," he muttered sullenly. He wandered to the edge of the circle of light cast by Samara's PIP-Boy 3000 and knelt by a small pool of murky, foul-looking water that reeked of sulfur. A quick taste revealed that it was brackish and unsuitable for drinking; _almost certainly radioactive too,_ Arcade thought sourly. That was all right, though; he had no intention of drinking it. Instead, while Samara worked frantically away at the eyebot, Arcade tried his best to wash the blood and grime from his filthy hands and chainblade. It was no easy task; the blood of the Marked Men and the-the Tunnelers, Arcade supposed-had combined into a substance somewhere between shellac and glue, and he had to scrape at the stuff with his fingernails and even handfuls of concrete dust to get it to release its grip. Traces still remained in the creases of his skin and deep under his nails by the time he heard the metallic sound of Samara closing the panel and the eyebot's "ready" whistle again.

"ED-E!" Samara cried. Arcade stood up and turned toward them. ED-E had risen from the ground and was once again hovering slightly above head height; Samara was gazing up at it.

"God, ED-E, I thought-I was afraid-"

The eyebot whistled reassuringly. Samara reached up to lay her hand along one side of the round thing's housing. Her face was almost glowing with happiness. A sudden, wild urge came over Arcade to simply march over there and shove her away from the bot; he fought it back, hard.

"Thank God I was able to fix you," Samara said, beaming up at the round satellite. The machine whistled again, and Samara laughed as if it had said something she understood. "I don't know what I'd have done without you."

Arcade kicked at the ground with one foot while Samara gushed over the bot, digging futilely at the rim of black blood under his nails. Samara herself was almost stainless, he saw when he glanced at her; the longer handle of the protonic inversal axe probably helped keep the mess away from her. There were a few spatters on her cuirass and shoulder guard, but that was all. That migraine was still pulsing in his right temple, and he winced at a particularly loud whistle from the robot. "That's right, ED-E," Samara replied, laughing again. It sounded so _wrong _to hear her laugh like that that Arcade gritted his teeth. "You _are _still alive. And we can move on."

The bot beeped in acquiescence.

"Come on, ED-E. Arcade," Samara called with a perfunctory glance at him. "Let's go."

_Sure. Why not._ Some devil was driving what felt like railway spikes into the side of his head, and Arcade vowed silently that when he caught the little bastard, there would be vengeance. "After you," he replied with saccharine cheerfulness. He waited to see if Samara would call him on it, but she didn't even seem to notice. She simply turned away and began climbing the ramp to the break in the concrete, that damned bot orbiting her. There was nothing for him to do but follow.

[*]

They emerged from the underground to stand on the remains of the highway overpass: the broken and cracked concrete roadway stretched off into the distance before them, dotted with burned-out cars and missing large chunks of itself. Above, the gloomy orange sky washed everything with somber light. Arcade squinted after the darkness of the caverns, while Samara checked her PIP-Boy 3000.

"Okay," she said after a moment. "It looks like we just stay on this roadway for a while."

Arcade frowned, still massaging his temple. "Is it intact the whole way? Because I'm not really in the mood to backtrack through that cave if it turns out otherwise."

Samara studied the flat green screen. "I think it should be okay. This looks like-"

That high-pitched whistle emanated again from the eyebot, screeching across their conversation like fingernails on a chalkboard and echoing back from hills and valleys of wreckage around them. Samara froze, yanking her eyes up from the screen to the eyebot; Arcade started in surprise, automatically raising his weapon.

"_There you are,"_ that grating voice boomed out, seeming to come from all around them at once. Arcade felt himself tightening up. _"You went quiet for a time. Was beginning to wonder if the Divide had claimed you after all. Should have known better. Divide can't kill you; you're too tough, too mean. We're alike that way. If the Bear had some of your toughness, the fight for the Mojave might be an even match."_

"You _son of a bitch."_ That frightening white light had leapt up in Samara's eyes. She raised her LAER at the bot, then lowered it again after a moment. Thunderclouds collided on her brow. It made Arcade's gut churn to see her like that.

"Haven't you caused enough trouble?" he called to the eyebot.

"_And your shadow," _the eyebot rumbled, _ "still following faithfully at your heels. Thought you would draw on him, turn on him, payment for deception. But you kept him, I see, even after learning what he was, what he stands for. Him...and that machine of yours. Even now. Why, Courier? Tell me that."_

"Come on out here and I'll tell you _everything you want to know_!"

Samara's whole body was drawn as taut as a cable on the verge of snapping. Quickly, in an attempt to divert her, Arcade called out, "How did you know about-about who I was?"

The bot rotated toward him fully, with what seemed to be a faint air of surprise. _"Can smell it on you. You __**reek**__ of it-privilege, decadence; it's buried in your bones. Soft life breeds soft men. Soft women too. Take away that shiny Plasma Defender, that Ripper-you wouldn't last an hour. Not like __**her**__. Take away her weapons-a different story. A survivor from a line of survivors; we're alike in that way, she and I. She had to fight, to struggle for everything in her life. It's strengthened her, refined her steel. If the Bear had that steel, this war would be over very quickly. As it is...NCR hasn't the strength to do what's necessary. Caught between the world they want to be, and the world that is; unable to choose; trying-failing-to navigate between 'is' and 'should.' Legion doesn't try. It __**does.**__ That's what makes them better. That's why they deserve to win."_

"_Over my dead body they'll win!_" Samara shouted. Arcade felt his frown deepen as Samara's anger spilled over to him.

"Wait a minute, 'deserve to win?'" he demanded. "Hey, I'm the farthest thing in the world from a blind NCR supporter, but how can you possibly say that the _Legion_ is better than _they_ are?"

"Because_ he's Legion too._" The fire in Samara's eyes leaped up; they seemed to glow with a terrifying white light. Her face contorted in rage. "_You. Legionary. Bastard._" She said the word _Legionary_ as if it were the vilest insult possible. Arcade didn't know whether to step away from her or to go to her and wrap his arms around her-if perhaps doing that could quench her blazing wrath.

"_Bull, you term me. You say true. Bull I am, now. I walked the East as you walked the West, saw the miserable, barren tribes, clinging to life, saw the Bull come, swallow them, knit them together, make them strong in ways the Bear could only dream of. Bear's too squeamish; won't stand for blood on its paws. Bull...Bull isn't afraid to trample its enemies, grind them into the dust beneath its hooves. Strange truth of life in the Wastes: if you grind an enemy down far enough, crush them to abjection, the enemy can become an ally. Bear doesn't understand this...or if it does, scruples to use it. Bull knows this well, lives this knowledge...and Bull succeeds." _

Samara only snarled. Arcade knew he should keep silent, but he _couldn't_ let it lie; he wet his lips and called back, "That sort of success isn't worth the cost. At least the NCR realizes this." He paused for a moment in thought. "Most of the time, anyway."

A short contemptuous chuckle rolled out of the eyebot's speakers, echoing back from the canyon walls as the bot turned to face him. "_Surprised __**you'd**__ say that, shadow man. Your Enclave knew this too, though rarely used it. No, your Enclave preferred to eradicate, rather than to ally. Scouring the Wastes clean of impurities...in the long run, could only weaken them. Few who walk the Wastes are 'pure,' in __**any**__ sense of the word. Enclave sought the peace of the grave...and that's just what they got. Wonder, shadow man, how much of those attitudes you imbibed. Is that what you're working for, with her for? To finish what your Enclave started?"_

As that grating, grinding voice rolled over him, Arcade felt himself bristle with hostility. "Look, they're not _my _Enclave, all right?" he called to the bot. "The Posiden oil rig base was destroyed before I was even _born_, I had nothing to do with any of that. And furthermore-"

"_**Who cares!?**_" Samara roared. "All I want to know from you _right_ _now_, you Legionary son of a bitch, is how to _find you! _Tell me! Tell me _now!"_ She raised her weapon and pointed it again at the bot, trembling as if she were on the verge of shooting-

"Wait!"

Arcade hadn't realized he'd interrupted Samara until she swung on him. He recoiled a step and held out his hands automatically.

"Arcade, _stay out of this!_"

"Samara, _quiet._ We talked to a-a Marked Man," he said, gazing up at the eyebot. "He said something about a town? That Samara had-had made a town here? In the Divide? What was that about?"

"_A town?" _The eyebot paused. "_Suppose you could call it that. Place of houses, people, families...hopes. Dreams. A town...or a new life, better life. Better world. Yes, Courier,"_ and the voice out of the eyebot suddenly sharpened, _"__**you**__ built the place, caused it to grow out of the dust of the Divide; you found the path, opened the road for others to come after you; __**kept **__that road open through seasons, storms, bringing the stuff of life to those who settled the trail you walked. Your home, Courier; perhaps not the place you were born, but the place you loved. Must have. Only love could have sustained that kind of dedication. " _Samara stared at the eyebot without the slightest hint of comprehension, her face dark with wrath. _"Built from the Old World but not of it, forged from the lessons that were all that remained in the ashes of what once had been. A place where new thoughts could take root, a new nation could grow-until it died. Until NCR came. And Legion. And you._"

Timbres of bitterness and pain laced the dark, distorted voice. "What happened to that town?" Arcade asked.

"_Not your place to ask me, shadow man. Hers."_

Arcade glanced over at Samara and could tell immediately that all of what Ulysses had said had gone right over her head; there was only fury and a sort of baffled frustration.

"_Tell me where you are,_" she growled.

"_Walk west into the sun, and keep walking until it dies. There-I'll be waiting."_

There was a _click_ as the transmission shut off. Samara gave a frustrated cry and pulled her LAER, aiming it at the eyebot again; then lowered it. Instead, she stood still, rigid and staring down the open road ahead of them, her body trembling with anger. Arcade went to stand beside her, reached out to her, almost touching her shoulder, then refrained. Again, he wondered distantly if he should wrap her in his arms, if that might drain the fury from her. Somehow, he didn't quite dare.

"Wow," he said at last, trying to lighten the tension. "I have to say, after listening to this guy, the NCR never looked so good."

He thought at first she had not heard; she made no outward acknowledgement, but slowly, the stiff set to her shoulders began to relax. "Son of a bitch," she muttered, so quietly, Arcade almost could not make out her words.

"Samara, are you-?"

She drew in a long breath. "We should go. The faster we find this guy..." She trailed off.

Together, they stepped out of the shadow of the arch and onto the High Road.


	3. Chapter 3

The sun was dawning pale when they emerged from the underground; the sky was a mellow, washed-out gold as the sunlight reflected through the cloud of dust and grit that hung ceaselessly over the divide. The ruins were transfigured in that light, concrete fragments and burned-out cars taking on an elegaic aspect more suited to the ruins of temples; the overpass was washed in rays of yellow and pearl and cream. The highway, its lanes divided with a shattered row of concrete barriers, slanted up past the overpass arch; at the top of its rise, a defunct light post and the twisted wire skeleton of what had once been a highway sign were outlined in stark black across the soft pastel of the sky.

Leaving the protection of the overpass, they climbed along the right lane of the highway. The slope was steep enough that Arcade had to work at it; his Combat Armor Mk. II seemed to weigh twice as much and he found himself breathing hard as he levered himself uphill. He watched Samara's back as she strode ahead easily in her Powered Armor, and her little eyebot bobbed after her whistling happily to itself. Its whistles ground on Arcade's nerves, and he thought distantly he would gladly have seen the damned thing melted down for scrap.

They were almost at the top when Samara froze. One hand reached for her weapon. Arcade, coming up alongside her, started to ask what it was, and then he saw: two black forms, silhouetted against the sky at the crest of the overpass, coming toward them.

"Samara-"

"I see it. _God_-damn," she snarled, raising her weapon. "ED-E, if you-"

"Wait." Arcade laid a hand on her rerebrace. "Not yet."

She glanced at him, dawning anger on her face. "Arcade, what are you _doing_?"

"I don't think they're attacking." And he pointed. "Look."

Both individuals were so heavily backlit that it was impossible to make out any fine details; but they appeared to be approaching slowly and neither of them had drawn their weapons. The figure in the lead stopped and gestured sharply to the one behind to stay still; then he raised his hands.

"_No...fight."_

With those words, the lingering question in Arcade's mind was settled; the man's voice was the same harsh, painful-sounding gurgle of the other Marked Man, Blister, that they had questioned before the overpass.

"_Closer. No...fight. We...no fight."_

Samara glanced at Arcade. "What do you think?"

He shrugged. "What have we got to lose?"

"The last time..." She trailed off, and her hand clenched on her rifle.

"If they wanted to attack us, they could have done so by now," Arcade countered. "There'd be no need to go to all this trouble."

She considered that briefly, then nodded. "All right. But be on your guard." To the two figures above them, she called, "_Keep your hands where we can see them!"_

The lead figure gurgled assent. Slowly, Samara and Arcade climbed up the remaining stretch of slope that separated them from the Marked Men. The eyebot bobbed behind them, whistling every so often.

As they reached the top, they found a small camp that had been built across one lane of the defunct highway. To the east, a windbreak had been constructed out of a military transport truck and some large business signs; the north side of the shelter was a concrete divider that had been reinforced with sheets of corrugated metal to make a "wall" of sorts. A small fire was burning in a hearth made of an old truck tire; two mattresses, some ammo boxes and a couple of chairs filled in the rest of the area. Arcade took this all in at a glance, turning his attention on their two hosts.

They were Marked Men, all right; if that hadn't been obvious from the man's voice, it was immediately apparent from the flayed surfaces of their arms and legs, where their armor left them bare. The armor, Arcade observed, consisted of damaged and crudely repaired Legion armor, and the one in front-

"That mask," Samara murmured, nudging him. "What is that? I've never seen anything like that before."

Arcade guessed what it was-a copy of the mask belonging to Legate Lanius, Caesar's brutal second in command-but said nothing. He tightened his fingers around the stock of his weapon.

The leader had an assault rifle at his back and several frag grenades at his belt; his companion was carrying a shoulder-mounted machine gun, but laid it on the ground at a barked command-"_Pone telum!"_ Still, the follower remained tense, watching them closely. Arcade thought he could see resentment in the set of his shoulders. The leader kept his hands well away from his waist. _"Truce,"_ he rasped, his eyes remaining on Samara.

Samara glanced at Arcade, who nodded. "Truce," she agreed warily.

The Marked Man with the mask indicated her. "Cou...ri...er."

"Samara," she corrected, then gestured to her companions. "Arcade. ED-E."

"We ... know. We all know. Sa...ma...ra. Cou...ri...er." The Marked Man's voice sounded hollow and tinny, coming from inside the mask; the sentence died with a choked gurgle. He tapped his own chest. "_Beast."_

Arcade frowned. "What's this about?"

Beast turned that grotesque mask toward him. "Not ... you. _Her._" He turned back to Samara. "No...fight. Leader say...no fight. My...leader. Bonesaw." Arcade's throat and chest hurt just listening to that rasping voice. "At village. See...see you." He pointed up the road. "Safe...no fight. Go."

Samara looked over at Arcade blankly. "What's he talking about?"

Arcade frowned, trying to put together what Beast had said. "It sounds like, there's a village up ahead with a leader named Bonesaw who wants to see you. He's offering safe passage."

"Safe passage." Samara frowned. "Why does this Bonesaw want to see us?" she called to Beast.

"Talk." Beast gurgled. "Talk...you. You...Cou...ri...er. Bonesaw...talk."

Once again, she glanced at Arcade. "What do you think?"

"What have we got to lose?" Arcade replied. "Look, they haven't tried disarming us, or taking us prisoner."

Samara considered that, then nodded.

"All right," she called to Beast. "We accept your terms. Safe passage. But you better not be doublecrossing us," she growled, glaring hard at the Marked Man.

Beast choked a negative. "There. That way," he rasped, pointing down the highway. "Go...to end. Village...there. Sentinels...will stand aside. Watch-" he coughed, a horrendous sound as if he were hacking up his own lungs; Arcade winced inwardly in sympathy "-Deathclaws," he rasped.

Samara glowered, but Arcade hastily called out, "Thanks for the warning. We appreciate it. Come on," he said, turning to his Power Armor-clad companion. "Let's go."

Beast and his companion stood aside as Arcade, Samara, and the eyebot started up the High Road, watching them go. The subordinate still did not look happy-Arcade could tell by the set of his shoulders-but he was silent as they passed by. Arcade wondered distantly what he was thinking...and what they would find when they reached the village of Marked Men at the other end.

[*]

The High Road was a strange and rather eerie place, Arcade thought to himself as he and Samara traveled along the elevated freeway, their boots grinding on the pavement. Looking over the side, he could see the remains of a town far below, the buildings, ruined streets, and destroyed cars rendered small and somehow pristine by distance. From up here, the damage didn't look so bad; Arcade could almost pretend that the war had never happened and he was gazing down on a flourishing community. _Except for the silent streets, that is_. The wind blew continually, a light breeze occasionally gusting strong enough to make him reel sideways a bit. As he walked on by Samara's side, grit lashed their faces, but the road itself was mostly clear, except for drifts piled up in the lee of the walls on either side of the roadway and the concrete dividers in the middle.

The road was almost empty. Here and there were a few wrecked cars and trucks, a motorcycle or two, but for the most part the highway stretched out before them, clear and open, except where jagged chunks had been taken out of it by destruction and time. Once or twice by the dividers or in the lee of a car, they came upon a fire circle and perhaps a mattress or two, indicating that someone had been using the spot as a campsite recently. _Marked Men,_ Arcade thought.

Halfway down the road, a toppled skyscraper leaned at an angle over the risen bed of the highway. Two Marked Men waited up there, one carrying a sniper rifle, the other carrying a strange, boxy weapon that looked like some kind of missile launcher. Samara tensed, and her hand strayed toward her weapon, but the two sentries just gestured them through.

Samara strode ahead silently. The distant air that had hung about her before was back, and thicker; she seemed wrapped in thought, distracted. Something about the darkness in her eyes made Arcade uneasy. He considered reaching out to her-trying to engage her in conversation-but didn't think she would hear anything he said.

They walked on, through the sighing winds, the golden, diffuse light from the permanently overcast sky, the grit lashing their cheeks. Samara called a brief halt for lunch at what looked like a ruined highway interchange, but was silent and withdrawn throughout. Then they walked on.

It was late afternoon, nearing evening, when they came to the village. The highway sloped down to dead-end in a collapsed tunnel through a high bluff; the mouth of the tunnel was filled with tons upon tons of rubble, concrete and stone. A wrecked semi was lodged under the mountainous mass of debris, and a few splintered, shattered crates were strewn around the rocky hillside. The faded, almost obliterated stencils on the crates revealed them to once have held military ordnance. To the right, an off-ramp branched down in a long sweeping arc; another ramp led up a steep hillside to the left, between piles of jagged rock.

Someone was lurking there, in the shadows under the bluff. Samara raised her weapon as the figure came forward, revealing itself as a Marked Man in what appeared to be damaged NCR Trooper armor. The Marked Man raised his hands.

"You...Courier," he ground out.

Arcade stepped forward. "Are you..." He strained to recall the name they had heard earlier. "Bonesaw?"

"No," the man rasped. "Sen...try. Follow. I...take you. Come."

Without waiting for their acknowledgement the Marked Man turned and began heading down the road. Arcade followed readily; Samara did so after a slight hesitation. The tension in her shoulders was visible even through the Powered Armor.

Arcade glanced at her. "If they wanted to kill us or hurt us, they would have by now," he said in an undertone.

Samara's jaw tightened. "This is wasting time," she said at last. "We need to be finding Ulysses."

"Well, maybe they'll know something that will help us," Arcade tried to reason. "If they can tell us where he is..."

"_You! Follow!"_ the Marked Man barked from up ahead, cutting him off. Arcade complied; Samara did likewise, though the distance did not leave her eyes.

The Marked Man led them down the offramp past a burning trash drum, and up through a cleft between two towering rock bluffs. He stopped and turned back to look at them. "Care...ful," he said, pointing. Looking closely, Arcade saw the yellow disk of a frag mine nestled in among a scattering of rubble on the highway's surface. "Follow. Close."

"Will do." Arcade tried to repress a shudder. Samara said nothing, just shifted, glowering impatiently. She showed no sign of fear at the sight of the mine; then again, she somehow always managed to stay clear of mines and other traps. Arcade had no idea how she did it. As their guide started off again, Arcade made sure to follow his path almost exactly, avoiding the hazards he pointed out.

The stony heights to either side of the path loomed over them, shadowy and oppressive; cars were scattered here and there on the road, including one red fire truck. In a couple of places, what looked like radio towers had fallen from the heights of the bluffs above, forming arches under which their little procession passed. The path slanted upward to a new intersection, with a road to their right leading to a collection of ruins surrounded by high rock walls. The main road continued to a wire fence with an open gate, and a small square cement building beyond it. The dim and lurid light from the overcast sky gave everything a flat, unreal appearance; Arcade found himself wondering for a brief instant if he'd strayed into some sinister dream.

"Come," the Marked Man rasped. "Bonesaw. Leader. Come."

He led them past a couple more overturned trucks into the large, open space among the stone bluffs. Two one-story ruined buildings stood by the road, one on each side-really little more than skeletons-and the empty shell of a much larger, multi-story building was beyond them. It must have been under construction at the time of the war, judging by the rusting, mangled crane nearby and a couple of faded yellow vehicles-Arcade recognized them from prewar holotapes as construction equipment. He wondered if the smaller structures had been temporary quarters or offices related to the building project.

Among the ruins were five or six of those small, beehive-shaped stone huts he had noticed before; they were clustered in two groups, each around a central fire ring. More Marked Men were sitting around the rings, occupied in repairing weapons or armor.

As the sentry led Samara, Arcade and the eyebot into their midst, the activity slowly came to a standstill. At least two dozen pairs of milky eyes shifted to the newcomers.

One by one, the Marked Men began rising to their feet.

Samara visibly tensed, her fingers tightening around the stock of her weapon. Arcade felt a chill himself, but the Marked Men made no hostile move-merely stood, watching in total silence as he and Samara followed their guide through the small village, past one of the wrecked bulldozers. The corpse of a Marked Man was pinned to this one, and their sentry commented, when he saw Arcade looking at it, "Old...leader."

The sentry led them to a huge chunk of concrete that had probably once been a wall-floor join; it was massive, placed on an elevated pile of rubble, and formed an angle like a crude throne. A man sat on this throne, his arms folded, watching them approach. His armor was an indeterminate mix of what looked like scrapped Powered Armor pieces, old tires, and a Legion kilt. His face was hidden behind a steel mask. In form, this mask was like the one Beast had worn earlier, but it was more finely wrought; Arcade thougt it might even be an intact piece of Legion equipment, carried into the Divide. At his side the man carried a chainsaw; one hand rested on it as he watched them draw near. Their guide went straight up to the man, and bowed roughly.

"She...here. I bring... Her."

The man on the throne rose. He leapt down from the mound of rubble, as agilely as if the armor he wore weighed nothing. "You...do well," his voice came, hollow and tinny from inside his helmet. He turned to face Samara, noting and dismissing Arcade with no more than the briefest of glances, then held up his hands and rasped, _"Cou...ri...er!"_

"_Cou...ri...er..."_ came the gurgling, grinding affirmation from many throats, and slowly, in twos and threes, the Marked Men around them dropped down to one knee.

Samara took a taut step backward. Mounting unease showed in her face and again, she started to reach for her weapon.

"What the hell is this?" she demanded, her voice harsh and strained.

Arcade reached out to her. "Samara-"

She turned on him, glaring accusation. "Arcade, what the _hell_ is going on here?"

He drew a breath, biting back the temptation to say, _How should I know?_ "Samara, just calm down, all right? I don't think-"

"_You."_ Bonesaw spoke over him as if he weren't even there, addressing himself directly to Samara. "You. Ulysses. _Dei._"

Arcade was not expecting the final word, wouldn't even have understood the gurgled syllable, if it weren't for the fact that the other Marked Men repeated it as well, in their harsh, grinding tones.A chill ran down his spine.

"What are they saying?" Samara's anger had mounted higher, and her scorching glare redoubled. "Day-ee? What the hell...?"

Arcade turned to Samara, who had incomprehension written all over her face. "Not 'day-ee.' '_Dei.'_Samara," he said quietly, "They just called you a god. You and Ulysses both."

The unease on Samara's face deepened into something like alarm, and she stepped backward almost automatically. "_What? _That's the craziest-" Arcade frantically gestured for her to keep her voice down. "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard," she said in an undertone, scowling ferociously. "I've heard stuff from Freeside junkies that makes more sense than that!"

Arcade felt himself frowning as well. He looked back at the Marked Men surrounding them, all kneeling, all watching Samara with-_not reverence, exactly,_ he thought to himself-but at the very least a profound respect. "No argument here," he mused. "I don't get it. I mean, for the Legion it almost makes sense-Caesar does a hell of a lot to instill credulity and gullibility in his followers; he likes to keep his men ignorant and superstitious-makes them easier to control. But the NCR? The NCR are good little children of the Enlightenment, they should know better than this-"

Samara shifted impatiently. "Arcade, take a look at these guys. They're _ghouls-"_

"They're not ghouls-"

"Close enough. They're all probably half-feral already." She grimaced. "Of course they're going to pick up a few stupid ideas along the way."

"You're saying that the ghoulification process might render potential ferals more susceptible to implausible ideas? Possible." Arcade considered for a moment, while Samara stared at him blankly. "But why _you?_ Why not just Ulysses? I'd like to understand-"

"What does it matter?" Samara demanded. "Why are we even here in this village anyway? Why aren't we out looking for Ulysses right now?"

"Good question." He looked back at the chief. "Why did you bring us here?"

Bonesaw's mask completely obscured his facial features, but there was something to the set of his shoulders that seemed to indicate he was considering carefully whether to answer. From deep within that metal helm came the rumbling words: "You. Not Courier. Why ... you here?"

"He's my friend," Samara said at once. "He speaks for me."

"You...say...he talk?" The Marked Man leader coughed, once, a deep, painful rumbling in his chest. "You say. Good." He coughed again, and Arcade winced in sympathy; he half expected to see Bonesaw cough up a chunk of lung.

"Why did you bring us here?" Arcade repeated.

"See...you. Speak...to you. U...lyss..es. Wan...der...er. He say...kill you. I say-" here he pounded his chest "...No. I. Bonesaw. Say...no kill."

Arcade glanced at Samara. _No help there._ Samara was glowering at Bonesaw with a blank sort of impatience. "Why?"

The Marked Man shrugged. "You...gods. Gods...fight. Not us." He paused. The masked face turned, as if he was surveying the Divide, and all that lay within it. "This...ours. Once. Before...Wanderer. Ours. _Ours._" He pounded his armored chest again. That blank mask was unreadable, but Arcade thought he saw a sudden fierceness in the set of his shoulders. "No...Legion. No..._Enn See Arr._ Only...Marked Men...here. Now. Courier...kill Wanderer...ours...again."

"Why don't you kill him yourself?"

"_Arcade..."_ Samara growled.

"No, it's a serious question, Samara," he said, turning to her. "If they want him dead-"

"Ulysses is _mine."_ She turned on Bonesaw. "Understand this, ghoul: If anyone so much as _touches_ Ulysses, there'll be hell to pay!"

A horrible, wet, tearing, rumbling sound rose out of the Marked Man's chest, rendered hollow by the metal helmet; Arcade scarcely recognized it as a laugh. "Yes," rasped Bonesaw. "Wanderer...yours. Cou...ri...er. _Dea sola Deum caedere potest._"

_Only a goddess can slay a god._ Arcade's frown deepened. "Sounds to me like you're just trying to get someone to do your dirty work for you."

"_Who cares!?"_ Samara snarled, shouldering past him. "_All_ I want to know is, where is Ulysses?! Where is he?!"

Again, that horrendous wet laugh came from deep within Bonesaw's chest.

"You...ask," the man rasped. "You...kill?"

"Damn straight," Samara growled. Her pale eyes had that flinty, stony, hard light in them.

"You...kill. Good. Good." Bonesaw moved forward. "I ... show. Come."

He beckoned them over to a flat piece of ground that had been cleared in the center of the village, leading them through the gathering of onlookers. The Marked Men rose from their kneeling posture as he led them, following them at a respectful distance. The concentrated, focused way they watched Samara gave Arcade a creepy feeling, though Samara didn't seem to notice it. He wondered if Bonesaw's adulation was fully shared by everyone in the village.

As they approached, Arcade saw that the space where Bonesaw was leading them had been smoothed out and incised with artificial lines. Objects were scattered here and there on the flat surface, and it took Arcade a moment to recognize what he was seeing. _It's a map, _he realized with a start.

He glanced at Samara to see if she had recognized it also. Her pale eyes narrowed as she compared it with her PIP-Boy 3000, and then glanced up at the eye-bot behind them. "ED-E," she told the bot in an undertone. "Record this."

The bot whistled acknowledgement. Some of the Marked Men in the crowd muttered among themselves at this. _Sounds like they don't like the bot any better than I do,_ he thought. Bonesaw knelt at the side of the map, and Samara joined him, looking slightly ludicrous as she kneeled in her huge Powered Armor, still fiddling with her PIP-Boy 3000. Arcade quickly knelt as well.

"Map," Bonesaw said, his masked face turning toward them. "See. You...see. Map. Divide. I...show."

"Is it accurate?" Arcade asked Samara, who was still staring at the green screen on her wrist.

"Seems to be," she murmured. "Roughly at least." She looked back up at Bonesaw, her face hard. "Show," she commanded.

Bonesaw laid his hand down next to a large stone on the map. _"Here,_" he rasped, his iron mask unchanging. "Came in...here. Wreckage." He tapped at places on the incised network of lines in the dirt. "Came...past...Bunker. Past...High Road. Here. Village of Marked Men. Here."

"I _know_ where we are," Samara began, but Bonesaw held up a hand. That gleaming, inscrutable metal countenance regarded her. Samara fell silent, but Arcade, watching her, realized it was not the silence of the cowed. She was waiting.

"To find...Wanderer," growled Bonesaw. "Here." He touched the map. "There." He pointed, further up the roadway along which they had come. "_Asssh...ton siii...lo."_ The words reverberated oddly from behind his helmet. "There. Go down. Inside," he told Samara as she fiddled intensely with her PIP-Boy, recording his directions. "Down. At bottom...tunnel. Stairs. Through ... and out. Sun...stone Tower." He tapped another location. "Down. Village...Marked Men. They listen...Ulysses. Enemies. Fight them. Understand?"

"Enemies." Samara's face took on granite lines. Arcade, remembering some of the tribal confrontations he'd witnessed as a Follower of the Apocalypse, found himself cynically wondering if Bonesaw was trying to get Samara to kill these guys for him as well. No such calculations appeared to enter Samara's head, however; she simply tapped the information into her PIP-Boy 3000. "Ulysses's men. Got it."

Bonesaw nodded. "Go through..." he repeated, drawing his finger down a twisting line that might have been a roadway. "Through...ruins. Buildings. Here. You see?" He touched a dark, greenish-blackish scale embedded securely in the ground; It took Arcade a moment to recognize it as a scale from one of the humanoid creatures they had fought earlier. "Cave... Cave...of Abaddon." _The Destroyer,_ Arcade thought. "Tunn-el-ers. Be cautious. Tunnelers...kill."

"What are Tunnelers, exactly?" Arcade interrupted. Samara shot him a dirty look, but he ignored her. "We fought some already, right before the High Road. They looked humanoid-"

That deep, painful rumbling came from within Bonesaw's chest. "_Human._ Once. Not now. They...live here. Before. Before great sky fire. Fled. Underground. Changed. They...become. _Tun...nel...lers._ Divide..." He rumbled again here, uncertainly, and his mask turned toward Samara as if he expected her to know. "Ulysses. He tell. How they come here. What happened. He tell. Enough. _Look_," he rasped, indicating the map again.

Samara bent to the map, looking back and forth between it and her PIP-Boy, while Arcade listened as well. Bonesaw touched a chunk of concrete, surrounded by small heaps of rubble.

"Cave...come out here. _Box...wood Hotel_. Roof. Climb-" He traced a fingertip down the side of the rubble chunk. "Climb down. Careful. _Dangerous,_" he said, stabbing his finger at the dirt to emphasize his point. "Here...Blade."

"Like a knife?" Arcade asked. Bonesaw shook his head.

"_Blade._ Ruler. Here...Village. Stealth Men. Blade...ruler. Blade...Ulysses. They guard...Ulysses. With...their lives. Blade...Kill. Stealth Men...hard. Vicious. They ... kill. Here..." He paused. Something about the tilt to his head made him look uncertain, even behind the mask. "Here..._Rawr."_

The Marked Man gave a horrible gurgling growl that made Arcade wince, both for its ferocity and for how painful it sounded. _Those...Stealth Men...he talks about must be real pieces of work._ He thought of some of the worst Fiends he'd heard of. _They can't possibly be as bad as Cook-cook...can they?_ He suppressed a shiver. "Dangerous," he replied. "All right, we'll keep it in mind."

The set of Bonesaw's shoulders suggested hesitation, as if he'd missed some fundamental point. Bonesaw started to speak, but Samara chose that moment to butt in. "Where's _Ulysses?_" she demanded, putting one hand on the stock of her weapon. "Tell me where_ Ulysses_ is! That's all I care about right now."

"Ulysses. Yes. Here." Again, Bonesaw bent to the map. He indicated a structure shown by the broken neck of a beer bottle, jammed into the earth. "Here. Go _here..._" and he traced another line on the map. "And you find. _Tem-ple of Ul-yss-es."_

He spoke the words with an evident reverence that surprised Arcade, and made him feel slightly abashed, though he couldn't tell why. The Marked Men gathered around and behind him all silently covered their hearts with their hands at the mention of the temple of Ulysses. Samara frowned.

"Temple? Like, an above ground structure?"

"No." Bonesaw shook his head. "Bunker. Deep...underground. You go...go down. Launch..._siii_-_loo_. At bottom...Ulysses is. Be..." He looked up at the two of them. _"Be cautious,"_ he warned them. "Ulysses...live down there. His home. He will have...two. Like _that."_ Here, he pointed up at ED-E.

"Eyebots?" Arcade asked.

"Yes. Eyebots. Two. With him. They ... heal."

"Medical eyebots," Arcade murmured, glancing at Samara.

"We'll have to take them out before we can get anywhere with him." Her face stony, she bent to tap the information into her PIP-Boy 3000.

"Yes," Bonesaw confirmed. "Eyebots. They heal. Guard. Ulysses...have guards. Marked Men. Blade's men. They...will fight."

Samara's face was set and unmoving. "We can handle them." Arcade said nothing, but privately wasn't so sure.

Bonesaw, however, seemed to think it was funny. "Handle. Yes." He laughed, that horrible, tearing, wet noise echoing beneath its helmet. "Yes. Handle. Ulysses...temple. Defeat him there...and Divide...is ours. Yours." His metal mask lifted from the map, gazing at her. "_Cou...ri...er."_

"I don't want it." Samara stood up abruptly, and ED-E chirped. That stony, frozen expression had set on her face, each line distinct and clean. "All I want is Ulysses's head. I don't care about anything else." Bonesaw laughed again, rising to join her.

"That...you will have. Cou...ri...er."

"Thank you for your help," Arcade put in, and breathed a small sigh of relief as the distance in Samara's eyes lessened a bit. "I do have one question for you, though." As Bonesaw turned to look at him, he asked, "On the road, Beast warned us to be careful of Deathclaws, but we didn't see any. Are there Deathclaws around here?"

Bonesaw turned his mask to Arcade, as if pondering. "Death...claw. Yes. _Rawr!_" Again he made that horrendous gurgle. "Dangerous. Death...claw. Here. Death...claw. Stronger. Faster. Come. See." He gestured toward one of the smaller two buildings, and started toward it through the crowd.

Samara's face tightened again, but Arcade again laid one hand on her rerebrace. "Just go with it," he half pleaded with her in an undertone. "I know this seems like a delay, but look at it this way: any information we can gather about what waits for us up ahead will help."

For a moment, she seemed as if she wanted to resist some more, but then she gave a single nod. She allowed Arcade to take her by the arm and lead her after Bonesaw.

Samara and Arcade followed him around the corner of the building to the place where a burned-out semi had crashed into the wall, collapsing a substantial portion of it. Bonesaw led them through the collapsed portion of the building into the slightly sheltered interior.

Inside, lying in the center of the rubble-strewn floor, was the whole carcass of a Deathclaw, cut up in chunks; clearly the Marked Men had been in the middle of butchering it-for claws, hide, perhaps for meat, although Deathclaw meat was so unpalatable it was a food substance of last resort for most people.

While the Deathclaw dominated the center of the floor, it wasn't alone; perhaps a dozen mattresses arranged around the edges of the room held injured Marked Men. Their bodies bore huge gashes and horrible, rending wounds that were clearly the work of the Deathclaw lying in chunks in the middle of the floor. To a man, they were silent, giving no sign of the pain they must have been in, but the air was filled with the rasp of their tortured breathing.

"Deathclaw," Bonesaw explained, nodding to the carved-up creature in the center of the floor. "Come. Fight ... village. We ... kill. You see," he rasped, indicating the men on the mattresses. "You see... These. Hurt. Deathclaw hurt."

"The Deathclaw wounded these men?" Samara murmured. She took in his words with no change of expression. Her eyes flicked over the Deathclaw, the long claws on the hands that were strung on a rack to dry, noting the thick slabs of musculature that had been carved from its body; Arcade guessed distantly that she was assessing combat potential. His own attention was focused on the injured men lying on the mattresses. He approached the closest one, a man bearing huge, rending slashes from his neck to his torso. He was appalled to see that the man had not even been bandaged; the slashes were open to the air, blood clotted dark and black at the ragged edges of the wounds. His clothes were matted with blood and dirt.

A bright flare of outrage lit Arcade's chest. Almost without thinking, he turned on Bonesaw, fighting fury.

"Why haven't these men been treated?"

The village leader's masked face turned toward him. "Trea...ted?"

"Treated, goddamn it!" Arcade knotted his fists. "Look, you haven't even cleaned his wounds! You're just going to leave them here, on these filthy mattresses in this-" He flung one hand toward the Deathclaw chunks, curing in the center of the floor. "This butcher shop? What's wrong with you?"

"Arcade..." Samara's brow was furrowed.

Bonesaw appeared to consider for a moment, then nodded. "Leave. Yes. They...wounded. They... Men... no... fight. Only...die. Leave...leave here. With... Deathclaw. It..." He paused as if searching his memory, trying to find words, concepts to fit the situation. "Honor," he said finally. "They see... They know... It...die...too."

_Of course. The goddamned Legion influence._ Arcade knew that Legionaries looked down on healing, often devoting only minimal resources to it; they believed that a good soldier would never let himself get wounded in the first place. He rubbed his eyes, trying to keep a tight grip on his temper.

"You can't leave them like this. Let me treat them."

"Arcade..." Samara's voice had grown sterner. He ignored her.

"You...treat...?" Bonesaw asked.

"_Yes._ I'm a doctor. I trained with the Followers of the Apocalypse. I have-I can help these men, damn it!"

That hollow mask studied him for a moment longer. "You...treat," Bonesaw affirmed, and held up his hands, stepping back as if in permission. "Treat," he said, gesturing to the men. "Treat."

"_Arcade._" Samara grabbed him by the arm and turned him to look at her; her eyes were solid ice. He could feel her fingers digging into him. "What the _hell_ are you doing?" she demanded, quiet but vicious. "We didn't come here to treat ghouls. We came here to _find Ulysses_ and-"

"You know what? Speak for yourself, Samara." Arcade wrenched away from her, that bright flare of anger stil burning in his chest. "If you're so desperate to continue on your little revenge quest that you can't wait half an hour while I do the _bare minimum_ for these men, then be my guest. But I took an _oath,_ Samara," he said, holding her eyes. "And I am not leaving here until I have treated these men _to the best of my abilities."_

He faced her, angry and ready to argue, and a little afraid as well; he didn't know how she would react. Her eyes brimmed with that cold fire, her entire body was as tense as a coiled spring...and she backed down. She stepped back and nodded.

"All right," she said. "Go ahead. But _hurry_."

Samara stood with arms folded, practically tapping her foot with impatience, as Arcade moved among Bonesaw's wounded men, doing whatever he could do for them. It was pathetically little. The Followers of the Apocalypse were used to working with next to nothing, improvising, and making do with rudimentary equipment, and Arcade had worked under conditions more hopeless than this a few times-but not many. The men bore their injuries silently as Arcade moved among them, washing their wounds with irradiated water (better than purified water for ghouls; the rads promoted healing), bandaging them with strips of cloth that might once have been rags of carpet, doling out what chems he had-in the absence of an operating theater, chems were all he could offer. Buff-out, Jet, Med-X, Hydra-recklessly moved by the men's terrible pain, he gave away almost his entire chem stash, keeping only a single dose of Med-X and one of Jet for himself. He knew that he might need the chems later, but he could not, simply could not, deny such suffering. The chems weren't enough-none of it was anywhere near enough-but it was all he could do_._

The Marked Men were quiet, accepting his treatment of them stoically, but he could tell from the changes in their breathing, the set of their filmy, white eyes, that they knew he was trying to help them, at least. Their compatriots drifted in from outside, standing silently along the walls, watching; Arcade could not read their flayed, featureless expressions and wondered what they were thinking. As he injected his last dose of Hydra into a man who had both legs and one arm mangled, he saw his ... patient's? ... red, flayed brow furrow. He sat back on his heels, watching the pulpy, fragmented appearance of the limb begin to firm and strengthen, and wiped at his brow with one hand. _God damn..._

Footsteps behind him recalled him to himself, and he looked up as Bonesaw approached. Behind the Marked Man, he saw Samara, still leaning in her place against the wall; she hadn't moved, but her face was shadowed, and there was something strange in her eyes as she watched him.

"You. Heal...er," Bonesaw rasped.

Arcade said nothing. He didn't feel like a healer at that moment. He felt impotent. _Helpless_. He knew that the few shots of chems he could provide didn't come anywhere near to being enough. He was swamped with the feeling that the whole thing was futile. The knowledge of what he _could_ have done for these men, back at the Followers' facilities in the NCR or even at the Old Mormon Fort in Freeside, filled him with a grinding, unbearable frustration and rage.

"Change their bandages daily," he instructed Bonesaw as he climbed wearily to his feet, wondering if the other Marked Man was even listening to him. "And when you do, wash their wounds with irradiated water. Make sure they get plenty of rads. It's the best thing for them."

Bonesaw nodded. "As...you say." He paused, then laid one hand to his heart. "Hea...ler."

"_Hea...ler,"_ Arcade heard the other Marked Men echo.

"Cou...rier. Wan...derer. Heal...er."

_Goddamn it._ Arcade could think of about a billion things he'd rather have happen than to be inducted into the Marked Men's little religious cult as their newest demigod. He managed a sour shrug. "Whatever."

The Marked Men accompanied the two of them to the edge of the village. "There," Bonesaw rasped, in that horrible, painful-sounding voice, pointing down the roadway that split off and continued between two bluffs.. "_Siiii...loooo._ There. Go."

"Take care of those men," Arcade pled with Bonesaw, having not the slightest idea whether the other ghoul would actually do it.

"As...you say. Hea...ler," Bonesaw rasped from behind his mask. "And...you. _Cou...ri...er._ Kill ... Ulysses."

"I intend to," Samara said coldly.

As they took their leave, resuming their journey along the cracked and broken highway, Arcade looked back. The Marked Men were gathered at the edge of the village, dark forms among the ruined pre-war buildings and the stone block huts; they watched silently, their hands on their hearts, receding into the distance as Samara and Arcade continued on down the road.

[*]

They reached the Ashton Silo Control building as the sky was starting to darken. That stony silence had tightened its grip on Samara almost as soon as they had left the village of the Marked Men; it was an almost visible aura surrounding her. _It's as if all she can see is the road to Ulysses_. The distance in her eyes scared him, but he couldn't think of any way to breach it; he followed her unhappily, clenching and unclenching his hand on the stock of his Plasma Defender.

The Control Station was a one-room concrete building that had been constructed on an overlook, with the right wall abutting a rocky cliff face. A solid-looking metal door was set into the side of the cliff; perhaps it was Arcade's imagination but the door seemed to have an almost sinister air. A crumpled, chain-link fence bristled around the area, with a gate marked by a rusted, bullet-riddled sign:

WARNING

MILITARY INSTALLATION

ANY TRESPASSERS SUBJECT TO F... TRESPASSING... MILITARY PROPERTY...A FELONY ... WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW

The building's walls were jagged stubs, no more than chest high, and its roof was gone. A satellite dish stood on the cliff face above. Wind keened mournfully through the ruins and whined in the links of the chain fence.

One of Ulysses's white symbols had been painted next to the gaping hole where the door had been. Samara said nothing, but he saw a muscle in her throat work. She stepped over the doorframe and inside. Arcade followed, with the eyebot bobbing above their heads.

The interior of the small room was devoid of almost everything save a computer console, standing against the ruins of the north wall like a mute guardian. Its green lights flickered faithfully, signalling that even after centuries of silent waiting, it was still ready to perform its function.

"Those ancients knew how to build," Arcade commented.

Samara did not reply. He wondered if she even remembered he was there. As she went silently to investigate the console, Arcade wandered up beside her. He looked out over the jagged stump of what was left of the wall, taking in the view.

The control station had been built overlooking a large basin, perhaps the size of Freeside. The walls of the basin consisted of the jagged, hollow remains of tall office buildings and skyscrapers, backed by rising bluffs; on the far side, a twisted ribbon of elevated freeway threaded its way through the wreckage. The floor of the basin was almost completely clear of debris, as clean as if it had been swept with a broom, and in the center of it was a low shape that Arcade could not at first understand. It seemed to be a rectangular surface of concrete, slightly elevated, and featureless except for a circular indentation in the middle bisected by a dark line. He could not make heads or tails of it-and then it struck him. He was gazing at the mouth of a missile silo.

"My God," he breathed aloud, feeling sick. He took a step back. The hair was standing up on the back of his neck. He was cold. _They put it right in the middle of town,_ he realized, taking in the surroundings: the ruined office buildings around it, the freeway looping throughout the area. _Right in the middle of..._ His mouth seemed too dry; he wet his lips, wondering if he was going to be sick.

"Samara, did you see-" He reached out, almost unconsciously, to touch her; she shrugged him off.

"ED-E," she said, glancing up from her work. The eyebot chirped and floated forward, examining the console for a moment; then an electric bolt arced from its welding tool to the console, crackling bluish-white. The console beeped pleasantly, and a section of it opened up. A panel with a red lever rose into view.

"What are you doing?" he asked her.

"Going to open the silo lift," Samara replied tersely, without sparing him a glance.

"All right." Arcade looked toward the metal door, inset into the side of the mountain. "If you-"

"Hang on," she interrupted. She pushed the lever down.

A titanic rumbling filled the air; the ground shivered. In the distance, an alarm began to blare, flat and authoritative. Showers of tiny stones cascaded down the rock bluffs to either side of them; beneath their overlook, larger boulders dislodged themselves and went bounding down the slope. _What the hell-?_ Arcade was glancing around, trying to get a handle on what was going on, when an ear-splitting, grinding metallic _screeeeeeeech_ drilled into his ears. His head jerked around automatically toward the source of the screech-and he froze, his blood running cold within him.

Down below, in the concrete structure at the bottom of the basin, the missile silo doors were sliding open.

Arcade was rooted to the spot. It seemed as if he was watching the most hellish nightmares of the Old World made terrifying reality. The alarms continued to scream, echoing across the Divide; that awful rumbling grew louder, stronger, threatening to shake their tiny enclosure apart. Slowly, the rounded nose cone of the missile that had slumbered below the surface of the Divide for centuries was rising into view.

Arcade's skin crawled with horror. It was as if the carcass of some ancient, long-dead monster was coming at last to life, hauling itself out of the grave to wreak untold devastation on the world. As the length of the missile continued to rise from its tomb like the spectre of billions of deaths, he grabbed at Samara's arm, almost completely unaware of what he was doing. _"No!"_ he cried, clutching at her uselessly. "Samara, stop it somehow, you _have-_"

A brilliant light dawned below as the rocket's boosters cut in, and his words were swallowed up in the thunderous roar of the engines. That roaring filled the world, shaking the ground under their feet. Slowly, the tall column of metal began to lift itself up, into the sky. Samara stood silently, her face turned upward, following the rocket's arcing trajectory.

By the time it reached the top of its parabola, it was evident that something was wrong. The rocket began to wobble in midair, tracing a serpentine trail of smoke. Its gyrations grew larger and larger, and Arcade raised his arms to shield his face reflexively as a brilliant flash of light flared out. The shattering detonation that followed beat against his eardrums and a rush of superheated air surrounded him; he heard the Geiger counter in Samara's PIP-Boy 3000 begin clicking madly. When he lowered his arms, he could see, far off in the sky, an expanding round cloud of smoke and fire.

_Oh my God..._

Samara's grip on his arm jolted him out of his reverie. "Come on," she said, and jerked her head toward the iron door set in the side of the bluff; it was already folding itself away.

"Samara-"

"_Move._"Her face was as stony as the bluff above them. She turned and started toward the gaping entryway. Numbly, Arcade followed.

[*]

On the other side of the door lay Hell itself.

The door led into a large concrete vestibule that had been carved out of the rock of the cliff face. Its roof was in shadow, and banks of electronic equipment stood against the walls. The vestibule ended in a large, open wire cage inside a steeply slanting shaft; it took Arcade a moment to realize that he was looking at a rudimentary lift.

The vestibule was rocked with explosions. Tremors ran through the floor underneath their feet; the bulwark of stone around them was shuddering as if from a series of mortal blows. Detonations shattered the air, echoing from the rock walls and assaulting Arcade's ears like the cracking and rumbling of thunder. The entire place seemed to be shaking itself apart around them.

Roughly, Samara strode toward the lift. With no hesitation at all, she stepped out onto the platform with the eyebot following. Arcade started after her, the ground heaving under his feet like the deck of an ocean-going ship. When he set foot on the platform, he felt it shiver and sway. The ominous sound of creaking wires and cables could be heard even over the din.

Samara was tapping at a control console near the front of the lift. He had to shout to be heard over the explosions. _"Samara, what the hell are you doing!?" _

She didn't spare him so much as a glance. _"Ulysses is down there!" _she shouted back. "_So that's where we're going!"_

He started to answer, but a huge detonation made him stumble; he caught hold of the wire side of the cage to steady himself. The wire was hot enough to almost burn his hands. Looking over the front edge of the platform, down the elevator shaft, he found himself staring into a solid wall of fire. Superheated air filled his nostrils, reeking of burning metal. As he gazed down the fiery tunnel, cold fear gripped him, turning his heart to ice and his limbs to water. A very clear image filled his mind of what would happen when the two of them attempted to descend on the lift. _Nothing could survive that-_

"_Are you crazy?"_ he shouted at her. _"Going down there is suicide!"_

"_I don't __**care!**__"_ Samara roared. _"That's the only way to get to Ulysses!" _

"_You're out of your mind!"_ It suddenly struck him like a physical blow that that might be literally true. Her face was lined and haggard, almost hollow with intensity as she worked the console. Another roaring explosion came booming up the shaft; a blast of desert wind burst past them, and the lurid light of flames flared briefly over the planes of her face, painting it as if with blood.

"_Samara, no-!" _He grasped at her arm; she shook him off as she might shake off an annoying insect. _"You can't- I'm not going!"_ he shouted desperately. His throat was raw with the burning air and with straining to be heard through the roaring and rumbling shaking the shaft. More cables were creaking, and there were a series of loud, shearing metallic screeches; a horrible clattering was rising up the shaft. _"I'm not going, you hear me!?_" He stepped back, toward the vestibule and the iron door to the outside.

Samara swung toward him, and he took another step back, recoiling from her almost instinctively. Her eyes were blazing with an absolutely terrifying white light; her skin was stretched so taut over her skull that he half-expected to see bone poking through.

"_Get on the platform!"_ she shouted at him, her face contorted with an almost divine rage. In that moment, she was the avenging goddess the Marked Men had called her. _Dea... _whispered a voice in his jumbled mind. _"Goddamnit, get on now!"_

As he stared at her twisted expression, it seemed somehow as if the surroundings dropped away. The booming of the explosions receded into dimness; their lurid light seemed to flicker silently behind Samara, backlighting her and flaring over her features. The planes and angles of her face were suddenly completely alien to him; his eyes could not make sense of them, could not fit them into any recognizable pattern. A brief flash crossed his mind, there and then gone-that this was not Samara at all, that he was standing in the antechamber with a total stranger.

_She's mad._

The thought seemed to have actual _weight._ He turned it over in his head, examining it from all angles, savoring it while Samara's ravaged features filled his vision. The cold, icy fear that had swept him when he looked down the passage into the blazing inferno was back, filling all his senses, sparkling along his nerves; the world seemed to stand out with a numbing, crystalline precision. Somehow, in that strange, disconnected state, it dimly amazed him that he hadn't realized it before.

"You're insane." The words were calm, cool, spoken with almost diagnostic precision.

"Get on the platform."

Arcade slowly shook his head. "No." With that same distance, he found himself wondering who the person was; she bore some resemblance to Samara, but surely Samara had never looked like this-clinging to the ragged edge of sanity by her fingernails. "No," he said again, and took another step back. "Go down yourself. Without me."

"_Get. On."_ And her finger curled over the trigger of her LAER rifle.

Time seemed to stand still. A bright thrill ran through Arcade's nerves and prickled over his skin: not fear, exactly, but not far off. She hadn't raised the weapon _at_ him-_not yet_-but she didn't have to. The steady, glowing light in her eyes burned hotter than the beam from any laser rifle.

_She wouldn't-_

But a deeper voice whispered, _Are you sure?_

Suddenly, he realized he wasn't sure what he was more afraid of: the elevator shaft, or the woman standing across from him.

Arcade's legs seemed to move almost without conscious thought, carrying him forward, out onto the hard metal floor of the lift. Without taking her eyes off him, Samara pounded the console with a fist. The lift lurched into motion. They were on their way.

[*]

The air in the shaft was so hot it felt like it was scorching his throat and lungs. He could _taste_ the metal, an unpleasant sour tang heavy on his tongue. As the floor of the lift sank underneath him, it shivered as if it were about to fall to pieces any moment; the heavy cables holding them groaned as if they were on the verge of snapping. Showers of sparks jetted brightly as the lift's sides scraped the walls.

_We're going to die...we're going to die...we're going to die..._ The thought repeated itself in Arcade's brain numbly as he struggled to keep his feet. The noise was deafening. Shrill screeches and squeals overlaid thundering booms and explosions, assaulting his ears with sound. His eyes fixed on Samara almost as if by accident: a huge, bulky, blocky armored figure standing at the edge of the lift as straight as a heavy concrete monument. His eyes clung to her as if she were the only thing helping him to keep his own balance.

There was a tremendous detonation and suddenly they were engulfed in a wave of fire. Arcade felt the searing heat on his skin. He started to cry out, convinced this was the end, but then the fire was gone, leaving only the stench of burning in its wake.

"_Samara!" _he shouted. _"Samara!"_

He had no idea what he was about to ask her to do-surely to go up was as dangerous as to go down-but it didn't matter. She didn't hear him. Even through the armor her entire body showed tense, as if every fiber of her being was focused on the goal at the bottom of the silo.

More detonations rattled the lift. The smoke was so thick it was choking him; the ozone stench of fried electronics seemed to coat his tongue and chew at the back of his throat. His eyes stung, streaming tears down his cheeks. Further gusts of fire belched at them, singeing his skin and leaving layers of soot over his armor. The screeching metal and thundering explosions were digging into his ears, along with a strange clattering sound that he couldn't identify. He fought to stay on his feet, his hands clenched on his weapons so tightly his fingers were numb. _This can't possibly get any worse-this can't get worse-this can't-_

Another explosion sent him reeling. His armored shoulder crashed into the chickenwire side of the cage, which absorbed his impact, and he looked up to see-

"_Tunnelers!"_

The eyebot sang its threat cue at the same time as Samara's shout. Her silhouetted form raised the glowing inversal axe against the backdrop of the fiery elevator shaft. Arcade flung himself back toward the center of the lift, away from the deformed, greenish humanoid shape clinging to the wire above him.

The tunneler bounded after him in one smooth leap. Frantically Arcade clutched at his Ripper. His hands were sweaty and the weapon felt like it was sliding in his grasp. His heart was beating hammerblows in his chest. _Shit...Shit...Shit...Samara-_ More tunnelers were scrambling over the front edge of the lift, and the crackle of Samara's inversal axe reached his ears. The creature swiped at him with its long claws. Arcade staggered backward another step, still fighting with his Ripper, and the tips of its long yellow claws raked along his armor. Something about those claws seemed to stand out to him, clear and distinct. _For digging,_ he thought in a kind of mad frenzy. _Just like a mole rat-_

The creature lunged for him again and he dodged, as another burst of fire echoed through the raft-only to have another, unseen tunneler take a swipe at him from the side. The lift was swarming with them-they were climbing up along the sides of the shaft, dropping down from the ceiling-a quick glance toward the edge of the lift showed that Samara was standing in a pile of tunneler corpses even as she continued to hack and scream with the inversal axe. _This is __**insane**__-we aren't going to survive this-_

Something struck at his heel and his feet swept out from under him. Arcade fell heavily, banging his helmet against the corrugated metal floor. The jolt was enough to temporarily blind him. His blood froze as two broad, bright eyes, each the size of the moon, filled his vision, to be replaced by dirty yellow claws. He jerked his head aside as the claws crashed into the metal floor less than an inch from his ear-close enough that he felt the breeze and heard them whistle. _Shit!_ The creature was snuffling and growling. The floor underneath him was so hot he could feel it through his armor: he felt as if he were lying on an oven. He rolled to the side, trying to simultaneously evade the tunneler and scramble to his feet. The claws crashed down again as the creature struck at him-

Then Samara was there, screaming in fury. Her axe swept a glowing blue crescent across his vision as she swung it over her shoulder to embed it in the tunneler's greenish-black neck. Black blood sluiced out, almost scalding hot where it spattered over Arcade's upraised arm. Arcade barely had time to react when Samara reached down with one gauntleted arm and yanked him to his feet, the servos in her armor whining. Her eyes met his in a brief flash, then shifted past him. "_Arcade!"_

He turned, and had the quickest glimpse of a looming dark-green shape with broad bright eyes, before a powerful impact jarred the side of his head. His knees gave way, and he fell down, down, into darkness.

[*]

Arcade's first conscious impression was the feeling of a sharp stinging in the side of his neck. The wave of strength and vigor that flowed into him suggested that the sting had been the needle of a stimpak. He opened his eyes to see Samara leaning over him, her forehead knotted with concern.

"Arcade?"

"Wha...what happened?"

"A tunneler hit you." _Tunneler,_ his mind repeated hazily. "I killed it. I was worried," she admitted, biting her lip. "The tunneler hit you pretty hard. I thought..." She said nothing more, but he saw her swallow; she still watched him apprehensively.

Slowly, Arcade sat up. His head was aching and he felt fuzzy, out of it. Somewhere in the back of his mind, part of him was running down the checklist of questions he had been taught to assess neurological condition: _Name...location...circumstances of injury..._ a chill ran through him as he remembered the Tunneler coming toward him. He shook his head to clear it and tried to take stock of his situation.

His immediate environs appeared to be concrete: a floor underneath him, walls, a ceiling. Underneath him, he saw the outlines of the same seal that had appeared on the floor of the security room in the base when they had first come in. _Exitus acta probat,_ he thought, and grimaced unconsciously. Slight shivers were running through the rock underneath him, and he could hear muffled booming in the distance, indications that the terrific explosions they had come through were still continuing.

He pushed with his hands, trying to stand up, and almost fell; Samara was there at once, offering her metal-clad arm to lean on. The worry in her eyes hadn't abated. Solicitously, she assisted him to his feet, letting him hold onto her huge pauldron as he pulled himself up. She seemed to have the solidity of a metal pylon. Over her shoulder, he could see that eyebot bobbing and hovering, keeping watch for enemies.

Once on his feet, he had a better idea of where they were. They appeared to be in some kind of a concrete landing platform; the lift they had been on was parked at the side of the concrete floor, and the empty missile shaft ran up above them into the darkness. He could see occasional flickers of light reflecting dimly in the gloom and the distant sounds of explosions still came to his ears. Across from him, set into the concrete wall on the other side of the shaft, was one of the metal folding doors. Next to this was Ulysses' white symbol.

"Are you all right?" Samara asked him again.

"Yeah...yeah, I'm fine." He reeled a little as a particularly strong shudder ran through the landing, but caught himself again by putting out a hand and leaning on Samara's pauldron.

"Good." It was fascinating, some distant part of Arcade mused; he could see the cold stranger in her face advancing, wiping away the brief flare of intense relief that had come before. The stony distance flowed over her like a cloak, drawing her shoulders back, tightening her jaw, coming down over her eyes like a veil. She nodded to the door. "We need to go."

Arcade took a step away from her, unsteady, testing his balance. The floor shivered again, but this time he was able to stay upright. He shook his head.

"No."

"_No?"_ She turned to look at him now, and any concern she might have had for him was gone; her eyes were stone white. "What do you mean, _no?"_

"I mean, I've had enough." Arcade crossed his arms over his chest. A thrill of apprehension ran along his spine. Samara was staring at him with an immobility of expression that seemed to betoken shock. Arcade read in her features the contours of the stranger who had shown herself at the top of the shaft, and he wondered how well he'd ever known her. "This revenge quest against Ulysses is yours and not mine. I'm not going any further."

He held his breath, waiting for repercussions, not entirely convinced she wouldn't suddenly draw her weapon and shoot him on the spot. Her face remained in that peculiar fixed expression. "You don't want to go any farther with me?" she asked him. "Fine. You can go right back up if you want to." She jerked her head back at the elevator shaft. "But I'm going on _with _or _without_ you."

The last words were almost a snarl. She turned her back on him sharply and made for the door. The tremors of distant explosions still echoed down the elevator shaft, and shivers ran through the rock. From time to time, showers of sparks drifted into view. Arcade thought of the nightmarish trip down, and whether he could survive the ride back up-alone.

He stood there, staring up the fiery shaft, for a long time.


End file.
